The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  A year almost to the day after he had received the bishop’s letter—a year that had included a six-month-long hellish journey over water and land to the place then called Upper Canada—Father Gstir found himself in a pinewood forest trudging over an uncompromisingly flat terrain with a cloud of the Devil’s own insects, called blackflies by the English, buzzing over his head and the head of his horse. His territory—his parish—covered approximately two thousand square miles of practically unpopulated backwoods, an area filled with all manner of birds, beasts, and insects of prey. His task was to travel from one squalid cabin to another, avoiding those dwellings occupied by Protestants, known in these parts as Orangemen, bringing joy, comfort, and spiritual guidance to the German Catholics who had squatted on the land. Most of these settlers were so busy removing trees—and in a most unattractive fashion—that they hadn’t thought about the Blessed Virgin since they were children, if they had thought about her at all. The women had been glad to see him because his appearance suggested there might be someone—anyone—to administer last rites when they died in childbirth, as they so often did. The older men were respectful, though few had the reading skills or the time to study the catechism. The young men were difficult, sometimes almost surly, for it was they who ruled this domain, where physical strength was the key to survival. Still, it was one of them who had suggested that the good Father travel ten miles farther north, where a number of Alsatians and a few Bavarians were settled around the establishment of a sawmill.

  “Don’t bother with us,” said one of two young and alarmingly large backwoods brothers to Father Gstir as he tried to intercept them in the muddy yard of their cabin. “Leave us alone, old man, we’ve no time for redemption.”

  Father Gstir deeply resented being called an old man, for he was far from old, in fact not much older than the brothers themselves.

  “Go to the settlement ten miles to the north,” they told him. “Storekeepers and millers there have lives soft enough for religion.”

  The priest decided to forgo the correction he had been planning in regard to his age. “I’ll not give up on your souls,” he said. “But what then is the name of this village?”

  “Doesn’t have a name,” said one of the brothers. “Ten miles north, sawmill, gristmill.”

  Father Gstir set off in the direction the two brothers had indicated, the black cloud of flies accompanying him. When he had imagined Canada and his posting there, it had been the cold, the endless wastes of snow that he had dreaded. Now he longed for winter, prayed for it, for at least in winter there were no flies and the swamps and rivers would freeze, making his progress easier and the way shorter. But as he rode mile after mile in the heat and humidity of that early summer afternoon, he became aware that the swampy areas were becoming less frequent, that the ground was hardening underfoot, and that there was a slight rise in the level of the earth. He was enchanted by the appearance now and then of perfectly round ponds of water, a geological oddity he would soon learn were called “kettles” by the locals, though no one could explain why. It was shortly after he had skirted the edge of one of these that he emerged from the forest at a cleared area on the brow of a hill.

  What lay before him was a view of his first deep Canadian valley, one with signs of settlement near a shining stream, and he fell in love at once. He had to admit, however, even in the midst of his sudden infatuation, that the place was a cluttered mess, all vegetation having been recently torn up or chopped down, leaving behind acres of mud littered with uprooted and rotting tree stumps. Any attempts at architectural construction—even the sawmill and gristmill—looked temporary, haphazard, and dangerously frail, the boards from which the structures were built pale and raw in the afternoon light, men, oxen, and horses moving sluggishly around them. The humidity of the season had settled in the valley, and everything alive appeared to be swimming in a slow trance through cloudy water. Only the little river was filled with vitality—Father Gstir could hear the sound of it—as it picked up and tossed light that came from a sun barely visible in a milky sky.

  He saw all this, but he also saw how it would be later, with crops and orchards growing in the cleared areas, and with painted houses and barns, and with gardens sprouting flowers. He beheld all that was there in front of him, and all that he believed would be there in the future, and he knew he was home.

  Father Gstir was not unaware that most landscapes looked better from on high—from a distance—than they did once one was presented with the banalities of their details at a close range. Despite this, he dismounted from his horse and ran eagerly down the track that led to the valley floor, his cassock flapping, his fists punching the air. As he ran, the normal passage of time either collapsed or expanded (he was never able to accurately determine which) so that the surprisingly delightful aspects of the terrain through which he passed impressed themselves on his memory, as if he had been looking at them for a long, long time. Rock outcroppings and shallow caves suitable for the statues of saints, bubbling springs that were surely holy places, towering deciduous trees miraculously overlooked by the axe—important trees: oaks and chestnuts—delicate green ferns, and an array of colourful wildflowers in bright emerald grass all caught his attention as he rushed by them. When he burst into the muddy and now quite startled domain of the millers who had set up near the little river, he was gasping with joy. “You live here in this beautiful valley, this shoneval,” he told two men who were so whitened by flour that he almost believed them to be angels. “God be praised!”

  The younger of the two men smiled and held out his hand. He was long-limbed, fair-haired, with a well-chiselled rectangular face. His skin glowed opalescent as a result of its coating of white dust, and the folds of his clothing shone. As he moved toward the priest, a chalky cloud rose from him into the sunlit air.

  It is at this moment that the spinster herself quietly enters the story, for the young man bathed in flour who stood smiling and holding out his hand introduced himself as Joseph Becker, and Joseph Becker was eventually to become her grandfather.

  Son of a Bavarian miller, Joseph Becker had been lured to Canada at the age of twenty because of his passion for wood and the rumours he had heard about an unlimited supply of this material in the forests of the New World. After his initial dismay at finding nothing but cleared land in the southern regions of Canada, he had pushed steadily northward until he had reached the bush through which Father Gstir would soon trudge. But even there the trees seemed to disappear before he could fully appreciate them, lumbering being the chief capitalistic enterprise of the time. He was searching for perfect blocks of carveable limewood, or basswood as he would learn to call it in Canada. In his imagination he had already carved ornate altars from the trunks of the massive trees he had read about before departing from Bavaria. From the ages of fourteen to nineteen, he had been apprenticed to a stern old wood-carver in his native town of Ottobeuron, but by the time he was nineteen he was becoming impatient with his master’s reluctance to permit him to carve anything larger than putti. Still, Joseph had to admit that under the older man’s instruction he had learned well and now knew how to use various chisels, the combination of delicate and forceful hammer blows employed to encourage flesh to emerge from wood. He had also become a master of polychrome and could work with gold or in an array of colours.

  In Canada, however, he had had next to no opportunity to make use of his training for anything other than recreational purposes, and time for recreation did not come easily. For a while he worked in the very lumber camps that destroyed the trees he cherished. But he could not bear to accept employment in the sawmills, where once, and only once, he witnessed the massacre of a tree trunk large enough for a beautiful sculpture of God the Father Himself. Soon his frustration and almost physical pain, his feeling that the very saints and angels he would have carved were murdered, and his knowledge of the terrible ordinariness of planking combined to make it impossible for him to take an axe to a tree ever again. He left the lu
mber camps and began to work at his father’s old trade of flour milling in the nearest town, moving north again only when the opening of a gristmill in a valley surrounded by new, raw German homesteads permitted him to do so.

  Flushed and panting and filled with wonder, Father Gstir came to an abrupt halt directly in front of the tall young man whose pale, powdered demeanour made the priest believe for one dizzying moment that he might actually be in the presence of the angel Gabriel.

  Then the divine being spoke in the voice of a human. “Hello, Father,” he said, gazing at him with benevolent curiosity. “Are you looking for bags of flour?”

  “This village,” gasped Father Gstir, his arms opening as if to embrace the valley, “this is why I am here. Suddenly I understand why God spoke to me in my mind, why I have been sent here.”

  Joseph Becker glanced at the sawmill, the gristmill, the log bunkhouse, and the few shanties that stood near it. “We aren’t much of a parish,” he told the priest, “though families arrive presently from Waterloo County. And,” he added, “there is no church.”

  The priest was staring with great intensity at the stream. “Such marvellous water!” he enthused. “From what miraculous spring does it emerge?”

  “Springs all over here,” Joseph pointed to a limestone outcropping on the opposite side of the mud track. “There’s water all over. Hard to find a dry spot to build a shed. These springs bubble up when you least expect them right under the floor.”

  “Holy water,” said Father Gstir, and then remembering the golden liquid of his homeland he added, “Perfect for a brewery.” He turned and looked up toward the height from which he had first seen the valley, the same hill where two decades later sun would shine through coloured windows of an established convent.

  “A church up there,” the priest said, pointing, “made of logs at first and then, in time, a stone cathedral.” He continued to gaze at the hill. “Or at least a large stone church,” he added, “with a magnificent bell.”

  Joseph was amused, even intrigued, but not at all convinced. “The people around here aren’t much interested in religion. Most of them are in the backwoods cutting down trees,” he said.

  “Then we must make them interested.” Father Gstir paused and placed his hand on his forehead, considering. “We’ll begin with a Corpus Christi procession,” he said slowly, turning briefly away from Joseph while he assembled his thoughts. “Colour, pageantry, perhaps singing. We’ll visit every corner of the valley, flush them out of the forest. Pageantry … in this place pageantry will be the answer.” He moved a few steps closer to Joseph. “How many parishioners would you say were within a day’s walking distance?”

  “A hundred, maybe two hundred, but …”

  The priest interrupted, “Do you know anyone, anyone at all, who might be able to carve a crucifix or the Blessed Virgin?”

  Later Joseph Becker would tell his granddaughter that at that moment he shared Father Gstir’s belief that to be in this unlikely valley had been part of a great plan, a key to his own destiny.

  “Yes, Father,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  Father Gstir applied for and received permission from the bishop of the sadly neglected diocese of Hamilton, Upper Canada, to remain in the place he would call Shoneval among the almost entirely German settlers of the incongruously named Carrick Township. (The single Irish family in the vicinity had successfully argued that because the English had changed the name of virtually every city, town, and hamlet in their homeland, they ought to be given the privilege of affixing this Celtic moniker to lands ruled by the British crown.) At first the priest slept in the bunkhouse with Joseph Becker and all the other mill workers, but his presence put such a damper on the men’s usual banter about women and their constant drinking of homemade whisky that in short order they built him a not uncomfortable log shanty.

  These were grateful men. They knew they had much to thank God for. Had they remained in Germany, for instance, they would likely have been soldiers by now, committed to fighting a number of petty yet deadly wars, the exact rationale for which no one was able to keep straight in their minds. They regretted the absence of a suitable number of women, but they were happy to be alive and not starving. They sensed God had treated them reasonably well, and they respected the priest as a result.

  Shortly after Father Gstir had installed himself in his new quarters, the bishop wrote to inform him that his request to stay in the valley had miraculously coincided with the arrival in Guelph, and in Hamilton, of six missionary priests from Europe who could now administer to Catholics in the rest of the territory. He was, however, to remain in contact with three or four nearby German villages about which the bishop had heard ominous rumours of planned breweries. Father Gstir, reading the letter to Joseph Becker, glanced up with fondness at the nearby crystal stream.

  “Procession, church, bell, brewery,” he announced. “These are our priorities.”

  Of the four, Joseph maintained that the men were only interested in the last. “We have only a sawmill and a gristmill,” he reasoned. “You have no parishioners. How can we have a church?”

  “The procession will bring the parishioners,” the priest assured him. “You must begin work on the crucifix.”

  And so in the low light of high summer mornings and evenings, before and after his work at the gristmill, out of a huge tree trunk grudgingly donated by the sawmill owner in order to rid himself of the pestering priest, Joseph Becker began to carve the body of Christ. He had brought his most beloved chisels with him from Bavaria, and made his mallets himself from scrap lumber found in the yard. But it was with an axe that he first approached the wood, loving the idea that he could use the instrument for creation rather than destruction. Stripped to the waist, his muscles polished by his own sweat, he skilfully chopped out the rough shape of a slender man whose slightly raised arms were extended as if to embrace the world. This was pure labour and he enjoyed it as such, his heart pumping, blood rushing to his back and shoulders. The following week, as the face and feet and ribs emerged from the beam, he remembered and recognized the joy of carving, the miracle of turning wood to flesh. By the time he began to fashion delicate details—facial features, creases in the fingers, nails, and thorns—he was almost brought to tears by the poignancy of what he had made. In the final stages, even the toughest mill workers were removing their caps before entering the hut he used as a workshop.

  Each day in the gristmill he had been aware that in the nearby sawmill enormous virgin trees, trees from which hundreds of beautiful sculptures might be made, were being fed to the teeth of the saws. Now late in the afternoon Joseph was permitted to shake the flour from his clothes and continue with the work of coaxing muscle and bone and sinew out of wood grain. At night by the soft light of the bunkhouse lantern he brushed curled shavings from his sleeves, dropped his trousers on a planked wood floor, and lay down on a cot made from timber and bark beside men whose lungs were filled with sawdust.

  It began to seem as if his whole life were made of wood.

  Years later as a very young woman, his granddaughter, Klara Becker, would experience similar sensations in her own workspace, which had once been her father’s blacksmith’s shop before he gave up in the face of all that heat and effort and had his horses shod in town. She would begin to understand the joy and oppression of the material needed for the task. But only in the moments when she could permit herself the luxury of carving, the moments when she was not making something for someone else to wear. In the early part of her adulthood, before she was changed by loss, her life seemed to be a minor war fought with a chisel and a needle, each tool demanding her time and attention, the shortness of her busy days suggesting she should perhaps commit to one profession or the other. And finally, how uncomplicated that war would seem in the face of the two real wars that would follow, the war with Eros, and then the Great War itself.

  As the days shortened and huge flocks of pigeons and geese flew southward, passing noisily over the r
oof of his shanty, Father Gstir began to write a series of impassioned letters to the Central Direction of the Ludwig Missions at Munich. Reasoning that if he were to make these epistles lively and entertaining he might more quickly reach his goal, and knowing his countrymen’s fascination with the trackless wilds of the northern New World, he decided that the Lord would forgive exaggeration if the exaggeration in question resulted in the building of a church. He described, therefore, terrifying encounters with wild beasts—particularly bears—“which approached in such great numbers that they crushed the large trees in their path,” and with wolves the size of horses “whose howls filled the night with such noise that a conversation between two men was impossible to hear.” He told of trees with trunks so wide it would take a healthy man ten minutes to circumnavigate them. When he made mention of the mill workers, he described them as hardworking, pious Bavarians whose desire for a house of worship was heartwarming to behold. “They will, of course, supply all labour free of charge,” he predicted with optimism. “But where,” he wondered, “are we to get money for stone and,” he added, “for a bell?” He had also envisaged an attractive rectory but felt it prudent not make further demands at this stage.

  In November, once the frost had hardened the ground, Father Gstir saddled his horse, strapped his portable altar to his own back, and attempted to negotiate the unreliable tracks to the outlying farms to disseminate the news of a magnificent Corpus Christi procession held the following June in the beautiful valley after which Shoneval had been named. The majority of the settlers he visited had but dim memories of this kind of pageantry, and many had no knowledge at all of the feast days of the church. But most had lived in isolation for so long that the announcement of any kind of collective experience was met with interest, and all promised to attend.