The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  One morning she found herself staring for a long time at her abbess, hurt by the fact that nothing of what she herself was feeling was evident on the wooden face. Then she began tentatively to touch the mouth and eyes, making the subtlest of incisions with chisels the size of insects. An hour later she concentrated on the small amount of hair that emerged from the cowl. Her grandfather opened the door, then stood in front of the window between her and the light. He was silent for a long, long time before he opened his mouth to speak.

  “I won’t talk about it,” Klara warned.

  The old man sat on a rough stool and looked closely at the sculpture.

  “Have you been to confession, Klara?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, knowing that he would think she had spoken of it there.

  She hadn’t.

  Joseph Becker ran his crooked fingers over the hair at the abbess’s forehead. “She is too sad,” he said finally. “Her hair, her hands … even her shoes are too sad. A woman this caught up with grief would be unable to counsel anyone at all.” He pointed to the wooden cheek. “This line in her face has a life of its own, like a tear falling across skin. An abbess would never allow a hair of her head to be out of place, nor sadness to rule her life. You’ll have to do something about that before you deliver her to the church. Father Gstir never would have stood for it.”

  “The church?” said Klara. It was the first time her grandfather had suggested the church as a destination for anything she had done.

  “Yes,” the old man said, “the church is the place for your abbess, but not, of course, until she has achieved sainthood.”

  “But I am carving an abbess, not a saint.”

  “Any work of art,” said her grandfather, “must achieve sainthood before we set it free to roam in the world.”

  Three months later the cloth had arrived. Klara often stood beside her cutting table in a sorrowful trance, staring at the red material, unable to pick up the scissors, unable to thread a needle. It was easier, somehow, to work on the sculpture, easier to be away from the house. On a wet day in spring, rain was racketing on the tin roof her father had recently nailed on her workshop to replace the shingles that had begun to rot and then to leak, leaving an irremovable dark stain, like a birthmark, on the statue’s left cheek. A miserable wind was forcing its way in through the cracks in the walls. She had been working on the fingernails of the abbess’ right hand, but her own hands were becoming too cold to continue this delicate work. And she was dispirited, knowing that soon thousands of men who had survived the war would be returning. They would be returning and Eamon would remain where he was. Vanished.

  Later when she told her grandfather in the kitchen she had given up on her sculpture, all he said was “This is too bad, Klara. Now there will be no carvers left in the family.”

  Joseph’s first admission that he had abandoned the idea of Tilman, that he believed the boy to be irrevocably lost, shocked Klara. It occurred to her, though she didn’t know why, that if her grandfather had let the idea of Tilman go, the old man would most certainly die, and quite soon. She walked across the floor to where he sat and clasped one of his hands. The history of the overwhelming labour of pioneer farming, the tools of woodcarving were all contained in this crooked warm package of sinew, vein, and bone. “Perhaps,” she began, “perhaps Tilman is even now a famous carver in Europe. Perhaps he is making such beautiful things we can’t even imagine them.”

  She didn’t want her grandfather to let the boy go, she didn’t want the old man to die. And in her heart she wanted Tilman to remain free, engaged in the life that was lived beyond the ordered walls of this farmhouse that so predictably echoed farmhouses all over the county. She realized suddenly that operating side by side with her grandfather’s need was her own … this desire to believe in another vital reality, one she couldn’t see. As if Tilman were a planet so far away as to be imperceptible, moving in a wholly different orbit, emitting an unseen, perfect light. If he were really gone then it would be as if the last vestiges of auxiliary mystery were abruptly removed from the world. “I think he’s still alive,” she said. “I believe he is the part of us that is learning the world.”

  The old man looked at his granddaughter—his blue eyes still piercing, inquisitive—and asked her what she meant.

  She dropped his hand and brushed one long white forelock from his forehead. Then she straightened her spine. “I don’t know what I mean, but I know I believe it.”

  “But not enough to continue the carving.”

  Klara heard the sound of her father’s boots in the woodshed. She walked over to the soup that had begun to bubble on the stove. “I believe in Tilman,” she said. “I just don’t believe in myself. I seem to be disappearing, even when I am present in a room.”

  “Someday,” Joseph said to his granddaughter, “someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won’t be able to prevent yourself; that’s just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.”

  Her father, who had walked into the centre of this strange conversation, looked at his daughter’s pale, tired face and thought, Poor Klara, I fear nothing will ever happen to her. But he said nothing.

  “I don’t know,” said Klara, ladling soup into bowls. “I just don’t know.”

  Before she had turned to walk out the door of her workshop for the last time, Klara had run the fingers of her right hand over the wooden face, which, she realized, would never be right, though oddly the stain had made the abbess seem more human. She looked into the blank wooden eyes and whispered, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you reach sainthood, couldn’t help you get into the church.” As she spoke she heard the steeple bell on the hill begin to call out the twelve hours of noon with its sweet, resonant voice and then a slightly higher ringing, with a thinner sound echoing it from the convent. For just an instant she visualized the nun and the priest, separated but still engaged in an act of communion, speaking together through their joint tasks. She envied them the joy of their faith, and their ability to communicate through this act of tolling annunciation. All her faith was gone and with it the desire for carving, for making something spiritual out of wood. With Eamon lost, she felt connected to no one.

  She knew that all that remained of the texture of his skin was what she could remember with her own senses. But, as the months went by, she began to feel the past was shutting her out. Eventually, she knew all that would be left of Eamon would be bones and teeth scattered who knew where. Sometimes she dreamt of these remnants, dreamt herself wandering some distant battlefield, having collected his bones, which she carried in her arms like a bundle of kindling. But in the dream she was always searching because although she carried the miraculous package close to her heart, there was always a rib or a thigh bone she couldn’t find.

  Sometimes while she was sewing she thought for hours at a time about life beyond her walls. It was then she felt most like a ghost haunting the businesses and shops of the only community she knew, of no relevance to the actors in any of the small dramas that were unfolding. She who had recorded the body measurements of everyone in town, who knew their vanities, intuited their secret romances, could determine their mood during a fitting by gesture or posture, left absolutely no trace of herself in the minds of those she encountered. She knew she was a purveyor of costume, of disguise, a fabricator of persona, one who touched only the protective surface, never the skin, never the heart. She was beginning, as a consequence, to envy almost everyone she met, to envy their small preoccupations, their carefully kept account books, the way they stood on streetcorners talking about farm machinery, the weather, the price of a bag of oats, fully connected for the moment to these ordinary things. Her own connections continually slipped downstream, against the current, toward the swiftly disappearing past. What, beyond the most cursory, practical knowledge of fashion, had the present to do with her?

  2

  TH
E ROAD

  Tilman had not paused at the bend in the road to look back at the farm. He had always enjoyed the far view of this familiar world, distance having knit together the disparate components of barn, orchard, pasture, and house into a satisfying whole—a picture he could take with him in his mind. But this time anger and fear drove him so rapidly forward he scarcely thought of anything but panic and motion. He was in full flight, passing swiftly through the scattered dawn mists of what would become a warm autumn day, breath entering and leaving his harnessed body, the chain scraping the pebbles of the road behind him. Despite the coolness of the early hour, his hair gradually dampened with sweat and turned from yellow to soft brown. He was twelve years old, was small for his age, but inside there lived an old man who knew the ways of the road.

  He had learned the advantages of knowing several Protestant hymns by heart. This he had accomplished on a previous journey by crouching under an open church window one summer in the town of Sebringville, concentrating fiercely so that the words, the tunes would enter him forever. On previous flights, whenever he was desperate he could stand on the corner of any street in any town and begin to sing “Unto the Hills,” or “Rock of Ages,” or “To Be a Pilgrim” in his beautiful boy’s voice with his cap on the sidewalk in front of him and be assured that he would have enough pennies by noon to buy sausage at a butcher’s, bread at a baker’s. He had been powerful in his freedom then, delighted by the awareness that absolutely no one knew where he was and that those he met briefly—a shopkeeper, a matron dropping pennies in his cap—had no idea who he was.

  Now with the chain rattling behind him, he avoided all human contact, not wanting the questions this evidence of imprisonment would undoubtedly raise. He kept to the country roads, lived on stolen hens’ eggs that he sucked raw and unidentifiable food he was sometimes able to glean from the pigs’ slop pail in night barns. The harness chafed his skin, he was half-starved, and by his third or fourth day on the road he had developed a harsh cough, but none of this was as bad as the chain attached to the woodshed door jamb of a house filled with intimates who could never understand him.

  And yet, as the days went by, and because he knew he could never go back, each night as he shuddered under a stolen bundle of burlap bags, Tilman mentally reconstructed the home he had left behind room by room, remembering a particular detail of a sofa or chair or the grain or scarring on a table. He had loved the house; it had never—until the end—seemed like a prison to him. This time he had been too late for the birds, which had made his frenzied progress less urgent in terms of reaching a premeditated destination. But he was left feeling aimless and adrift, and the physical particulars of the house anchored him somewhat as a fixed point of departure, since he had no images to associate with arrival.

  In early December, when it seemed he would never be warm again, he met an agitated figure—a bundle of quivering rags—on the road between Goderich and Clinton. He had been on his own for several weeks, long enough to become so familiar with the sound of his chain rattling behind him that he was instantly put on the alert when the sound ceased. He stopped and turned and saw a person behind him who was holding the last link with one crooked finger and who, when he tried to run, grasped the chain with two fists. Whoever it was reeled him in like a difficult carp.

  “Who are you?” the figure demanded in a woman’s voice. “What’s yer name?”

  He was close enough to her now that he could see clear blue eyes and a hawklike nose. The rest of the face was wrapped in scarves. A cap with earflaps covered the head.

  “What’s yer name?” the woman repeated. “Did you escape from a chain gang?”

  The sound of Tilman’s heart was so loud it seemed to be coming from outside his body. When he felt her tug on the taut chain, he began to shake.

  “Yer just a kid,” the woman said. “Think I’ll call you chain-gang kid.” She laughed and rattled the chain. “Do you like it, chain-gang kid?”

  Tilman did not answer.

  “The name, I mean.”

  Silence. The cold was enough to kill you. That plus the fear made his teeth chatter.

  Without letting go of the chain the woman removed one of her several shawls and threw it over Tilman’s shoulders. “That’ll make it better. You ain’t been on the road for long, that’s plain.”

  Tilman shook his head. His first response.

  “Well, you won’t get far with this thing draggin’ behind you like the leash of a mad dog. ‘Sides, we can sell it for scrap metal. My name’s Crazy Phoebe,” she said, holding firm to his chain with her left hand while extending her right.

  Tilman put his own hands behind his back. He had always distrusted this strange gesture that joined adults to one another.

  “Don’t shake then,” the woman said. “I’ll shake your chain instead.” She did this and laughed, breaking into a cough that lasted for several minutes while Tilman looked down at the road. “Giddy-up,” the woman said when she had recovered herself. “Let’s get goin’. Lucky for you I live in two places and one of them is junkyards, or at least them ones without them beasts from hell and has good owners. We’ll get rid of this,” she shook his chain again, “outside Goderich. Good junkyard there. Somebody’ll cut her off yer at the junkyard.”

  They began to walk. After a long silence, the woman continued, “The other places I live is basements, but only at farms with cellar doors.” They walked past the whole length of a prosperous-looking farm. “And good farmwives,” she added. “Some women is hell. They’s preserves in them basements been down there for years everyone’s forgot. They’s way back in the darkest parts hid by spiderwebs so as no one sees them, put there by some old granny whose all bones now in the graveyard. One year I lived entirely on strawberry jam. Fat as a dumpling when spring come.” She peered closely at Tilman. “You could use some fattening,” she said. “What yer been eating?”

  More silence from Tilman. Each night at dusk he had slunk toward compost heaps and dumps. One day he had eaten nothing but tea leaves and potato peels. Another day he had drunk a half-bottle of Doc Chrighton’s Grippe Reliever he had found among mostly broken and empty medicine bottles in a midden behind a woodlot. This had left him staggering and drowsy for two days. Since then the world had seemed slightly askew, and certain sounds—a dry leaf scraping over pebbles or a door slamming in the distance—had startled and disturbed him.

  “Chain child,” said Crazy Phoebe after a long pause, “you’re not even a kid, you’re a child. Kids roam in packs, as you’ll find out once you’re one of them. Chain child. Sounds better.”

  Now the chain hung slack between them as if they’d been skipping rope like he knew girls did, while chanting rhymes in a menacing minor key, in the schoolyard. It was as if he and this woman were waiting for another song to come into their minds.

  “Up there’s the yard,” said Phoebe after another stretch of silent walking. “Old Ham Bone there’ll cut her off’n you.”

  Tilman could see only a seemingly endless board fence, painted green.

  “Knew old Ham Bone in my youth when he was still raising hogs, knew him before I was crazy. Knew his dog too.”

  “What’s the dog’s name?” asked Tilman, his first question.

  “Saw Tooth,” Phoebe answered. “Known old Saw Tooth since he was a pup out barkin’ the bejeesus outta Ham Bone’s piglets on the farm. Known him since before I was crazy. Old Ham Bone give up the farm cause he didn’t have no woman round there no more. Anyways, he always got blue when them piglets growed up and had to be slaughtered. Saw Tooth got blue too. You know what happens to a growed-up piglet what isn’t slaughtered?”

  Tilman did not.

  “Damn things get so big from overeating they can’t raise themselves up on the hoof to get to the trough for no more slops so they starve to death.” Phoebe shook her head. “Damn things,” she repeated.

  They were walking along the fence now, a fence so long it seemed to Tilman to divide the world in half, and a fence
so tall Tilman knew there was no human being tall enough to see over it.

  Finally Phoebe forced aside one large, loose green board and squeezed through the fence, pulling Tilman after her. He was not unaware that the regular entrance, which was wide open, was only a few yards off. “Always go in this way,” Phoebe told him. She rearranged her several shawls that had become even more dishevelled when they caught on boards and projecting nails. “Always go out this way too,” she added in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Tilman looked around him at an array of rusting farm machinery, threshers, binders, hand and horse ploughs, pumps, gears, wrought iron, fire escapes, boilers, wheel axles, woodstoves, coal furnaces, and various unidentifiable bits and pieces. Behind two or three tangled lengths of iron he could see a wooden shack with a stovepipe projecting from its roof.

  “Ham Bone,” Phoebe yelled at the building. “Ham Bone, get out here and see. Phoebe’s got a brand-new dog fine enough to make Saw Tooth pea green with envy.”

  The door opened and a medium-sized dog whose black-and-white coat appeared to be made up of moulting feathers sprang into noise and action. Tilman moved behind his female companion while a black-and-white blur made loud, furious circles around the two of them.

  “Saw Tooth!” shouted Phoebe. “For God’s sake, settle down. I was just fooling. It’s just a tethered boy called Chain Child.”

  Saw Tooth shimmied over to Phoebe and licked her hand, then lay on his back while she caressed his feathered stomach.

  Tilman was watching a large, red-faced man emerge from the open door of the shack and begin to walk toward them. “What the hell …” the man said when he saw Tilman’s chain. “What the hell is this all about?”