(1993) The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  At the moment the rainbow makes its appearance he is standing, and the next moment kneeling, by the grave of his wife, Mercy.

  He, a stonecutter by trade, has set her gravestone himself, a mottled wedge split thin and polished, with her name and dates deeply incised on its center.

  Mercy Stone Goodwill 1875–1905

  Greatly Beloved &

  Deeply Mourned The work of engraving had distracted him in the first terrible days, but almost immediately he perceived that the monument was pitifully inadequate, too meagre and insubstantial for the creature who had been his sweetheart, his wife, his treasure. Now, each day, he carries one or two small stones from the quarry, caching them carefully behind a clump of willow at Taylor’s Corners, not far from the turning at Pike’s Road. He chooses the stones carefully, for he has formed an odd resolution, which is that he will set them without mortar. Gravity alone must hold them in place, gravity and balance, each stone receptive to the shape of those it rests against and in keeping with the abstraction that has lately filled his head like a waking reverie, a dream structure made up of sorrow mingled with bewilderment. Again and again he hears a voice, the same voice, asking the same question: why had his wife not told him a child was expected?

  Already the walls of the tower have risen to shoulder-height.

  Some of the stones he sets are no bigger than his thumb or his fist, some measure eight or ten inches across or more. This morning, in the rainbow’s garish light, their surfaces seem to dance in rhythm with the clusters of goldenrod that had opened up everywhere in recent days. Sun and rain, cloud and light, flower and stone—they are each so closely bound together, so almost prophetically joined, that he experiences a spasm of joy to find himself at the heart of such a holy convergence. His chest fills up with his own noisy relief, a cry of ecstasy, a wild howl of joy.

  He had thought himself alone in the world, but in fact he is a child of this solid staring rainbow, and of the persevering forms of light and shadow, of substance and ephemera. A child of the earth.

  Only later, walking home across the rutted fields, does he recall and give honor to the author of his happiness, uttering God’s blameless name aloud.

  For days at a time he is able to forget that he is the father of a child, a little girl named Daisy, and then something will jangle a bell to remind him. He might glance at the calendar on the kitchen wall and observe that the fourth Tuesday of the month is fast approaching, the day he sends off a money order to Mrs. Clarentine Flett in Winnipeg. Or he will observe, when the weather turns warm, how young children from the village bring lunches to their fathers at the quarry, lingering there to play for an hour or two with polly-wogs or with chips of waste stone, and always this sight will set him wondering what manner of child his daughter might be.

  Or Mrs. Flett might send a photograph of the girl along with a letter describing her steady growth, her genial disposition, or her cleverness at school. Daisy in her pictures appears an obedient child, careful of her dress, and possessed of a spare, neat body—and for this he supposes he should feel grateful. Her smile is neither forward nor timid, but something in between. (For some reason he is unable to determine whether or not she is pretty.

  Probably she is not.) The most recent photograph includes Mrs.

  Flett and Professor Barker Flett as well, one sitting on either side of Daisy on what looks like a grassy stretch of river bank, the three of them colored into character by soft gray tones, the family at ease, the family in love with itself, no trace of disharmony.

  Occasionally he will wake from sleep with his body trembling and his head soaked with the sweat of memory. There, dancing in the darkness, as plain as life, are the walls of the resurrected kitchen with its tumult and confusion, its circle of shocked faces, and the silent, sheeted body of his dear Mercy. The clock is striking the hour, and the striking seems to go on and on without ceasing, clanging behind his eyes, and muffling with its clamor the distance between that which is dreamed and what is remembered.

  While the others stand and stare like statues, he runs out the kitchen door and throws himself on the ground, rolling over and over, shouting and weeping and pounding his fists on the baked earth. "She didn’t tell me," he roars to the vacant sky, "she never told me."

  This is what he is unable to comprehend: why his Mercy had seen fit to guard her momentous secret.

  He supposes he must look upon her silence as a kind of betrayal, or even an act of hostility, but he is reminded, always, of her old helplessness with words and with the difficult forms the real world imposes. He tries to imagine what she felt while this ball of human matter was growing inside her, how she accommodated its collapsed arms and legs and beating heart, whether she feared its intrusion or if she perhaps loved it so deeply she was unable to speak its name, to share its existence or plan for its arrival.

  He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?

  Yes, it must be confessed—years later this is clear to me—that my father’s love for my mother had been damaged, and sometimes, especially when waking from one of his vivid dreams, he wonders if he is capable of loving the child. Daisy Goodwill, eleven years old, frozen in a camera’s eye. A little girl in a straw hat. A child perched on a river bank, solid, stiff, an unreadable smile playing on her lips. It would be unnatural if a father did not love his child, but what Cuyler Goodwill feels is only a pygmy love produced by the ether of custom. He has responsibilities. He sends money for her keep. He writes Mrs. Flett letters in which he expresses his concern for the child’s health and happiness, but, in fact, he seldom thinks in such terms. Who is this being, flesh of his flesh?

  (Daisy is not a name he would have chosen, but the child had to be called something, and he was in no fit state after my birth to turn his mind to names.) He studies her photograph. He thinks of her at odd times of the day. He is mildly, intermittently curious about her, and a little afraid, and lately, learning that she has suffered from the scourge of measles, he has wondered if it might not be expected of him to take the train into Winnipeg one Sunday morning and reassure himself as to her condition.

  But he shrinks from this awkward meeting. And from the confusion of travel—he has never been to the city, has never seen any reason for going—and is reluctant, anyway, to sacrifice the whole of a Sunday. On Sundays he reads his Testament, prays for forgiveness and works on his tower.

  It’s Sunday morning now, a fine June morning, and the iron bell in the steeple of the Tyndall Methodist Church is calling the faithful to worship, but my father is not drawn by this clanging and banging.

  Religion has not made a church-goer of Cuyler Goodwill. In the early days of his conversion he attempted, three or four times, the morning service in Tyndall, and once, once only, he walked seven miles west to the settlement at Oakmidden where he sat, bewildered, through the arcane rites of a Greek Orthodox mass. The noisiness of public worship—singing, praying, chanting, preaching—make him uneasy. The vestments of holy men, even the simple white Methodist collar, abrade his sensibilities, crowd him to the edge of his belief, and the dusted, raftered, churchy spaces assault him with their perfume and polish, belittling him, taunting him. Moreover, his natural instincts feel constrained by the order of holy service, the breathy invocations and amens and numbered hymns, and afterwards the obligation to shake hands with others of the congregation, to greet them soberly, to engage his tongue in social exchange—all this rubs the man the wrong way.

  Instead, almost by accident, he has fallen upon a mode of sustained personal meditation which is not so far removed from that practiced for centuries on the Asian subcontinent, a trance of concentration which was to become fashionable in our own culture later in the century, the foolish sixties, the sev
enties.

  In his case it is an ecstatic communion. On Sundays he approaches his Maker by a series of ritualized steps, rising at dawn, taking a breakfast of tea and bread, then walking out, and in all weathers, to the burial grounds off the Quarry Road. As he walks he recites to himself a scrap of scripture, a single verse usually, which he repeats over and over.

  There is none holy like the Lord, there is none beside thee.

  Again and again. The words beat at his temples like a secondary pulse. His boots strike the surface of the roadway in an answering rhythm that draws him behind the scrim of ordinary consciousness. He meets no one coming and going—the hour is too early for man or beast. In a small handcart, which he has cobbled together himself from odds and ends, he transports the stones he intends to set. He has come to believe that the earth’s rough minerals are the signature of the spiritual, and as such can be assembled and shaped into praise and affirmation. He also conveys, hooked into the loops of his belt, a mallet and a number of small chisels. His tools, his music, his offering—he carries all that he needs on his body.

  Where my mother’s solitary gravestone once sat, now rises a hollow tower some thirty feet in height and still growing. The stones that constitute its fabric have been chosen for their strength and beauty and for their effect on the overall design. A spiral of cantilevered stones protrudes, and these allow him to ascend the steep sides as easily as an insect or a lizard might scale a wall.

  More and more my father chooses to decorate the stone surfaces with elaborate cipher, even though Tyndall stone, with its mottled coloring, is thought to be resistant to fine carving. Patterns incised on this mineral form seem to evade the eye; you have to stand at a certain distance, and in a particular light, to make them out. This impediment is part of the charm for him. What he carves will remain half-hidden, half-exposed, and as such will reflect the capriciousness of the revealed world. Here he inscribes a few holy words, there the image of a bird, a flower, a fish, a face, a sun or moon. An angel half the size of his hand freezes on a worked limestone sky. A tiny stone horse grazes in a stony meadow. Cupids, mermaids, snakes, leaves, feathers, vines, bees, cattle, the curve of a rainbow, a texturing like skin—the tower is a museum of writhing forms, some of which he has discovered in the Canadian Farmer’s Almanac or the Eaton’s catalogue or in his illustrated Bible.

  The carving is done on winter nights in the warmed untidy cave of his widower’s kitchen, where he has set up a workbench and vise and a good gas light. He has already, after a day at the quarry, eaten his supper of fried eggs and tinned peas, and is ready to make the stonedust fly. His tools are simple, and his technique somewhat unorthodox—he is after all, a self-taught carver, grown skillful through long periods of trial with the wooing of relief and shadow and with the spare particularity the stone is able to release. Working slowly, he feels the world shrink around him, small as a pudding basin. His attention becomes concentrated as he moves from scratch to groove, as he joins line and curve, elaborating an image that is no more at first than an atom flickering in his brain, bringing to it all its possibilities while guarding its pure modality, its essence—this, always, is the hardest part—and preparing himself for the moment when the worked stone is complete. (I wish somehow you might see these carved surfaces, how they send back to the eye a shiver of yielded revelation, so full of my father’s sad awkwardness and exertion, yet so cunning in their capture of precious light.)

  Despite his gifts, the act of carving never ceases to be a labor for him—the whole of his body bends into the effort, and his face takes on that twisted monkey look of concentration you see on the faces of real artists or musicians. (Of course he never thinks of himself as an artist—his innocence is wide open like air and water.) Only when he finishes a piece and carries it to the site of the tower does he experience the fever of transcendence (though transcendence, like art, is not a word he would utter or even recognize). What he feels when the finished stone slips finally into its waiting space is the hand of God upon his head, the Holy Ghost entering his body with a glad shout.

  The religious impulse, as everyone knows—certainly I know—is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual communion, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity.

  For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven. (It has taken him years to work all this out.)

  For those seven pacifists forced out of the Methodist ministry in the city of Winnipeg in the year 1916, religion finds its net worth between the hard rock of private conscience and the equally hard place of the political platform.

  For those farmers and their families who are—right now, in the month of June—rebuilding the Chain Lakes Meeting House after it was burned to the ground by so-called patriots—for this congregation of Friends, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world.

  For Clarentine Flett, lying in a coma after being knocked down by a bicycle at the corner of Portage and Main, religion is a soft flurry of petals drifting and settling peacefully on the evening of her life. And for the seventeen-year-old butcher’s boy, Valdi Goodmansen, whose bicycle (exceeding the legal speed of eight miles per hour) was responsible for the accident, religion is the bottled broth he sucks like a starved infant in the middle of the night. Seek ye forgiveness and it shall be given. For Abram Skutari, who sold the boy the bicycle (twenty-five dollars), religion is an open window, as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window.

  For Magnus Flett of Tyndall, master stonecutter and abandoned husband of Clarentine Flett, religion is both the container and water of remembrance, holding sacred (that is leaving untouched)

  the shriveled leaves of a particular parlor plant of hers called the star of Bethlehem; also the vivid tactile memory of loose beds of stone from his native Orkney; also an image he recollects of his own father and mother, the two of them at dusk, dragging hay into a barn, and his father stopping to extract a foreign object that had flown into his wife’s eye, leaning down and removing it with the tip of his tongue.

  For Principal MacIntosh of Wesley College religion is the physic for right thinking, correct living, and earnest praying. "One thing this war has done," he writes in a letter to the Free Press, "is shaken us out of our self-sufficiency and brought us nearer to our Maker."

  For Bessie Perfect, a Wesley College student ardently in love with her botany professor, Barker Flett, religion is a painful obstruction that forms in her throat when she whispers his name against her pillow, and also when she sings, "Keep the home fires burrrrning / While our hearts are yearrrrning."

  Left to himself, Barker Flett, professor, scholar, collector of some seventeen different species of lady’s-slippers, believes religion to be a glorious metaphor for the soul’s desire. There is no God, no Son of God, no Holy Family, no resurrection, there is only desire. Desire for more. For perfection. For self-knowledge. Desire to possess all fifty known varieties of lady’s-slippers. Desire for sleep and forgetfulness. Desire for good and for evil. Desire for rapturous union, the object of which, he knows, can be, and often is, fraudulent. Lately he has been reading about a pollinating mechanism in which a male insect is attracted to certain small orchids, the lip of which simulates the sexual parts of the female insect. As a man of science, Flett finds the phenomenon obscurely disturbing, particularly the copulative gestures the excited male performs at the edge of the mute petal. He is also disturbed, though he has yet to acknowledge it, by the presence of eleven year-old Daisy Goodwill in his household, the bold unselfconscious movement of her body, her bare arms in her summer dresses, the unnatural yearning he experienced recently when he entered her darkened sick room and observed the sweetness of her form beneath the
sheet.

  Winnipeg in the year 1916 is an agreeable place. One can live a decent life in this city—despite its geographic isolation, despite the war across the ocean. Even the long hard winters are cheerfully borne by the complacent, generally law-abiding population, and indeed winter brings a benign, clean countenance to the raw look of wooden buildings and laissez-faire planning.

  Increasingly, though, the city is growing mannerly. A series of wide, new boulevards has been proposed, and an immense new legislative building in the neo-classical style is underway. Ground was broken back in the year 1913. The vast amounts of stone required for this ambitious undertaking have kept the Tyndall Quarry working full-tilt and the stonecutters steadily employed and well out of the Kaiser’s reach. Churches now stand on many of the downtown corners, sometimes two or three different sects represented at one crossing. ("Let us hope God has a sense of humor," quipped a well-respected Baptist pastor at a recent civic meeting.) These churches are made of stone, as are the many fine banks and insurance companies, also the well-known Wesley College and the new Law Courts. Scanning the municipal horizon, you can’t help thinking: isn’t this astonishing! A stone city rising up out of our soft prairie loam! (An eminent Chicago architect, on seeing the blocks of polished Tyndall stone, declared that American builders would be clamoring for the material, were they but to lay eyes on its beauty.)

  During the winter season Winnipeg offers a variety of theatrical productions, skating parties, balls, and dinners. In the summer the well-to-do flee the heat for the Lake of the Woods, and the less privileged make do with day trips to Victoria Beach or to various other interesting attractions of the region. Among the young people, those, say, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, a railway excursion to the village of Tyndall has become exceedingly popular of late. The cost of a train ticket is moderate, and the young people, picnicking on sandwiches and bottles of cold tea, grow very merry. The ladies greatly outnumber the gentlemen during these war years, but the gender imbalance, far from dampening spirits, produces an oddly exhilarating effect. Many bring along bathing costumes, since the old abandoned part of the quarry provides a sunken cube of clear, cold water which is ideal for swimming. But it is really Goodwill Tower they come to see.