The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  “I’m not going back to work,” he announced.

  Tilman had to agree it didn’t appear that he was.

  Across the tracks the winter sun was climbing a pine tree branch by branch. Tilman and Refuto had managed to beg some day-old bread from the town baker, and a woman near the tracks had given them some cheese. Refuto munched thoughtfully for a while before continuing.

  “I’m not going back to making those cast-iron woodstoves that no one wants to heat their houses any more.”

  Tilman began to pay serious attention. Each year at this time he became more and more interested in heat.

  “You’ve never been to the city.”

  “No,” Tilman admitted. Three times with Refuto he had to switch trains in Toronto. And one of those times they had wandered briefly into the huge marble palace of Union Station, but they had never gone into the city itself.

  “You do not know that there are two cities quite near to each other.”

  Tilman did not. He looked quizzically at Refuto, surprised that three times in succession his companion’s negative statements had coincided with reality.

  “Toronto and Hamilton,” Refuto continued.

  Tilman began pacing up and down on the platform. He was worried about how to put himself up for adoption. It had been five years since he had left home, and suddenly other people’s mothers opening the doors of their houses viewed him with suspicion rather than pity. He had become, without knowing it, a powerful-looking young man—almost an adult. He had forgotten when his birthday was but knew by the passing of each summer that he must be somewhere near sixteen or seventeen years old. He had grown hair on parts of him that, to his mind, had no business having hair, but he was afraid to ask, even to ask Refuto, what this might mean.

  “We’re not going to Hamilton,” Refuto shouted at him from the bench. “You can be sure of that.”

  “Hamilton,” Tilman repeated. “Not Toronto?”

  “Nope. That other city. The one nearby.”

  Refuto’s re-entry into the Italian district of Hamilton rivalled, in some minds, the return of the Medicis to Florence.

  He took Tilman down the Guelph Line Road through the villages of Cambellville and Flamborough. As they walked and occasionally hitched a ride in a delivery van or farmer’s wagon, the last curled yellow leaves were being blown from the maples that bordered their route. The wind was bitter and held the promise of a hard winter in its teeth. When they reached the edge of the long limestone escarpment that cuts through this part of Ontario, they were able to stand at its height in the town of Ancaster and look out over the industrial city of Hamilton and the filthy yet beautiful indentation in the coastline of Lake Ontario known as Burlington Bay.

  “That isn’t one big stinking mess,” said Refuto, “and it wasn’t once lovely, I suppose.”

  Tilman thought it was gorgeous right now, this bird’s-eye view of factories, docks, and houses. A whole city you could hold in the palm of your hand. He wanted to carve a bas-relief with all of the smokestacks included, and all of the boats out on the water.

  “Great big stinking mess!” exclaimed Refuto in a surprisingly forthright manner. Then, as if to correct himself, he looked sideways at Tilman. “Don’t tell anyone down there that I said that up here.” He paused. “Us up here and them down there and they don’t know it yet.”

  As it turned out he was wrong, for in the third storey of an industrialist’s house built up on the escarpment in order to avoid the air pollution caused by the factories in the city below, a second cousin of Refuto’s was hanging wallpaper in a bedroom so luxurious it even included a telephone. At the instant of Refuto’s declaration, this paper hanger, who had been looking out the window and wondering, concluded that it was indeed his cousin Nicolo Vigamonti, and he telephoned another cousin—a greengrocer—to tell him what he had seen. Every woman in the neighbourhood saw the greengrocer once a day. By noon, the whole community was on the street, looking up at the escarpment.

  Tilman and Refuto stood for close to half an hour on the edge of the escarpment and looked down at the city that the boy knew instinctively must hold the man’s family. The people in this family might or might not be happy to adopt a boy for the winter, but they would certainly want Refuto back for the rest of his life. Tilman felt that this was an uncertain and significant moment. Refuto might just as easily decide to turn back, to go to Guelph and hop a train. Or he might decide to enter that other city, the one with the marble train station, where no one knew either of them.

  It was the end of November, and though it hadn’t yet snowed heavily, there was frost everywhere. Tilman’s extravagantly patched coat was wearing thin. This was the only time of the year that architectural structures of any kind appealed to him.

  “Steel town,” Refuto eventually spat out bitterly. “I killed a man,” he announced, almost as an afterthought.

  “You couldn’t kill a man,” said Tilman.

  “I did and there’s no point your denying it,” Refuto sniffed angrily. “This man was my brother.”

  “He was not!” Tilman abruptly became aware that, absurdly, their roles had reversed and he was the person carrying the burden of denial.

  “I killed him with steel,” the older man continued. “I stayed in the stoveworks, making a parlour stove called The Persian Warrior. I don’t even know where Persia is, do you?”

  Tilman did not.

  “There was a job for more money at the steel mill. And I made him take it. He had more children so I forced him to take this job, this money. We argued all night, and finally I said he would not be my brother if he did not take the job, so he said he would take it if I would get the next one that became available. A week later he didn’t come home. After three days I went to the mill to ask. He was killed by a steel beam, they said, but they did not know who to tell.” Refuto glared down at the city’s smoking chimneys. “Do you know why they did not know who to tell?” he asked in a low voice.

  Tilman shook his head.

  “They did not know who to tell because my brother’s name was not listed on the payroll.”

  “You’re saying they weren’t going to pay him.”

  “Oh, they were going to pay him, but instead of his name they had the word ‘foreigner’ listed on the payroll. When no one came, they buried him in the potter’s field. They threw him out like trash.”

  “Then there wasn’t any mass said for him at his burial,” said Tilman, remembering now the church and the masses he had attended with his family.

  “Who wants to know?” asked Refuto warily, as if frightened by all he had disclosed.

  Tilman had learned long ago that Refuto expected no answer to this question. He noticed that white caps were developing in the bay and that the exposed trees on this rise were entirely bare of leaves and were bending in the wind. Christ, he thought, it was cold on this hill. He looked at the older man standing beside him, the torn expression on his weather-beaten face, and for the first time it occurred to Tilman that Refuto was afraid, afraid that he might not be able to find a job, afraid that his abandoned family would reject him.

  “Listen,” Tilman said gently to his friend, “anything you want is possible. My grandfather knew a priest once who built a gigantic church in the wilderness—right in the middle of a forest—a stone church. With a bell. And my grandfather carved the altars out of wood, just like he was in Europe.”

  The older man nodded. “This is why I have not almost returned,” he said.

  Tilman looked at Refuto quizzically.

  “I have not almost returned because of the carving.”

  “The carving?”

  “I have a son about your age who wants to carve angels with Juliani, who does the tombstones. He is hoping to be apprenticed.” Refuto pulled out a dirty handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. “I also have younger daughters,” he added.

  “Why did you leave them?”

  “Because I could not put the burden of a killer on their shoulders. Or put
the killer’s body beside that of their mother at night.” Refuto’s eyes took on the opaque quality Tilman had noticed the day they met. “Foreigner,” he said, “on the payroll he was listed as foreigner. He didn’t even have a name. At the stoveworks I didn’t have a name either. I was, he was, a not-person.”

  Tilman was quiet. Then he said, “I had a mother and a father. A sister too. But I couldn’t stay. Then my parents got this harness and they put it on me while I was asleep.” Tilman was looking straight ahead as he spoke, as if he were talking to the city, to the lake. “They put me on a chain so I wouldn’t leave.”

  Refuto looked at the boy’s profile, his large face filled with horror and compassion. “Oh no,” he said, “they didn’t. They couldn’t have chained you.”

  “Yes.” Tilman shuffled his feet on the frost-hard ground. He didn’t often allow himself to think of his confinement, his escape. He had a sadness for the parents he had lost, and now suddenly felt a deep love for the little girl who had set him free. When he closed his eyes, he could see her running at him across the morning yard. Then he thought of Phoebe, another agent of liberty. “A man who loved a woman cut my chain off,” he told his friend.

  The older man turned to the boy at his side. “I should not go down there,” he said quietly. “You should not tell anyone that I showed you this city, that we stood here looking down at it.”

  “You didn’t kill anyone … not your brother … not anyone. The factory killed him.” Tilman began to walk straight ahead on the road that descended into the city. There were at least twenty smokestacks in his view. Refuto hesitated, then followed, his strong legs making it easy for him to catch up. “Your family will be glad to have you back,” said Tilman.

  “No, they won’t,” whispered Refuto, though without any real certainty.

  The last word, always.

  Tilman entered a crowd so tumultuous that had he known of it in advance he might have taken Refuto’s suggestion and stayed up on the hill. Refuto—or Nicolo Vigamonti—was related to almost every Italian in the district. All of his relatives and most of his friends had congregated near the greengrocer’s on a street lined with similar-looking brick row houses fronted by an infinite variety of recently harvested gardens. The community was there to witness Vigamonti’s miraculous and much-prayed-for return. The weeping and embracing that ensued caused Tilman’s nerves to jump. Through no fault of his own he was swept with the crowd into an overheated house where Mrs. Vigamonti was being revived—she had fainted when she heard the news—by a flock of chattering elderly women and by her own young daughters.

  “I did not mean to leave you,” Nicolo shouted at her across the din.

  She continued to weep and to finger her rosary. Suddenly the room became very quiet. Tilman watched as the darkly clad widowed sister-in-law approached Nicolo. She placed one hand on his cheek. “I am so happy you have come home,” she said.

  And the room exploded into Italian and English cheers as her brother-in-law embraced her, his beard soggy with tears. Then he struggled through the crowd to his wife and his young daughters. “I thought I was a killer and a not-person,” he told them, while the smallest girl hugged his knees.

  The widow embraced Tilman, who surprised himself by saying, “Sorry for your trouble,” something he remembered being said at funerals by the few Irish families in Shoneval. An olive-skinned boy about Tilman’s age hovered near Refuto and eventually touched the man’s arm shyly. Refuto put his own arm around the young man’s shoulders and pulled him across the room. “This is Tilman,” he said. “He can make things. He is a friend to me, Giorgio, and soon to be a friend to you. He’ll show you how to make woodcarvings.”

  Giorgio continued to gaze at Refuto’s face. Tilman could tell that he was filled with joy, practically speechless in the wake of his father’s return.

  “I have made, already, marble carvings while you were gone … of an angel. The man at the gravestones has been teaching me how.”

  “This boy, we could never keep him from watching Juliani at the gravestones. So this is good. But Tilman will teach you how to carve wood, which will not be as expensive.”

  For the first time the two boys exchanged glances, sized each other up. Tilman was taller than Giorgio, but Giorgio was larger boned, more powerful-looking. Yet there was curiosity, not hostility, in the son’s gaze, and Tilman sensed that it would be safe to come to know him.

  That evening Tilman ate a meal larger than any he had ever consumed before. A rich, dark soup was followed by an assortment of slippery noodles in which he indulged himself to such an extent that he almost couldn’t finish the subsequent meat course. When a piece of yellow cake soaked in syrup was placed in front of him, Tilman began to believe that the whole community must be fattening up for the winter, that they would likely not eat again for weeks. He was filled with pleasure, intoxicated by nourishment.

  After the presentation of the new babies of several second cousins and the funeral photos of the recently dead, the family’s attention turned to the boy who had so recently entered their midst. The robust Mrs. Vigamonti, now thoroughly recovered, threw her hands up in despair after a close inspection of Tilman’s clothes and physiognomy.

  “Too skinny and too dirty,” she announced. “Needs scrubbing down and fattening up.” She looked sternly into his face. “Where’s your mama?” she asked.

  “Dead,” said Tilman, unknowingly telling the truth.

  “I found him out there,” said the man now called Nicolo Vigamonti. “He let me talk.” Nicolo shook his head, then looked around the room. “I’ve been gone,” he admitted, “but Tilman told me to come back.” He shook his head again. The crowd of Italians was sombre and attentive. Nicolo addressed the room. “I feel now as if my head is clearing in four directions at once.” He turned to his wife. “How did you manage, Lucia, with me gone?”

  “Giorgio took your job at the stoveworks.” She folded her arms and looked firmly at her husband. “They are hiring more men.”

  “This is good, Lucia,” said Nicolo, a hint of shame in his voice. “Tilman and I will go down there tomorrow.”

  “Am I old enough?” asked Tilman suddenly.

  Giorgio once again examined Tilman’s crop of blond hair, his height, his recently broadened shoulders. “You’re old enough,” he said.

  Despite the fact that he was required to appear at the stoveworks each morning at 7 a.m. and to remain inside its walls until early evening, Tilman did not mind the large, clamorous interior of his new workplace or the work itself, which seemed—for the time being—fascinating. Nicolo had announced early on that Tilman could carve wood, “trees, and the smallest, farthest cities,” he enthused, and soon Tilman was asked to make scenes for the elaborate wooden pattern moulds that provided not only the shapes of the stoves but any added decorative elements as well. While several Italian stokers stood behind him happily shouting words of praise in their beautiful language, Tilman deftly executed the tiniest branches on the tiniest trees, little noticing the irony of this in relation to an iron woodstove called The Forest Eater.

  The stoves he came to know were made in all shapes and sizes, attempting in their own cumbersome, heavy way to imitate marble fountains, sinuous statuary, oversized porcelain vases, exotic four-legged animals, chariots, thrones, and canopied beds. The Forest Eater was itself reminiscent of an early Renaissance writing desk, but unlike the other stoves and presumably in deference to its name, it had bark-covered stumps for legs and roots—rather than paws or hoofs—for feet. Tilman made one forest for its side panels and another—this time with a medieval city nestled in its midst and a stretch of meadow in front of it—for its door.

  This work took him several weeks. When the casts were finally made and multiples of the completed object were seen in the works, Tilman suffered for some time from the sin of pride, as did Giorgio, who had designed the stumps and the roots and the huge acorn for the top.

  “What will happen to our Forest Eater, I wonder,”
Giorgio mused as he and Tilman ate the lunches Lucia Vigamonti had packed for them. “It is most certainly a parlour stove,” the dark-haired boy continued, “and so will seldom be lit. I predict, therefore, it will not burn down many houses.”

  Tilman allowed that it was comforting to know this.

  “Though it is mostly stovepipes and chimneys that are the real problem,” said Giorgio, “the stoves themselves are supposed to be on fire.”

  There was a damper on the door of The Forest Eater, just below its meadow, and when this damper was open its future owner would be permitted a view of the red glow of the fire inside. Tilman would like to have seen that. The final touch.

  Giorgio then went on to describe the few burnt houses he had seen in his lifetime, with the family’s stove or stoves standing guilty and unharmed among the ashes.

  “They are that strong, our stoves,” he said proudly.

  To his surprise, Tilman was able to live inside the rowdy hysteria of the Vigamonti family for almost four years, loving the food and enjoying the unintrusive companionship, earning a reasonable salary at the stoveworks and helping to supplement the household income by paying room and board. Every now and then he disappeared, sometimes for up to two or three weeks, but he always returned and was welcomed back both to the house and to his job. Giorgio had quickly become a friend, and Tilman missed his daily companionship when, after a few years, Giorgio left the stoveworks to work full-time as an apprentice to Juliani the tombstone-maker. Once he had a chisel in his hand every day, it took the young man no time at all to outstrip his master in skill, and soon he was signing the elaborate tombs of industrialists. The stern marble faces of these men can still be seen in the graveyards of Hamilton, though they have become soiled over the years from the soot produced by the factories that made them rich enough to afford tombs of this nature. Now and then Tilman would visit his friend at the monument works, and finally Giorgio taught him one or two things about carving marble. Though the blond boy still preferred wood, there was, he had to admit, something satisfying about making hills and forests appear on the surface of such apparently unyielding stone.