The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  Tilman had hated the factory, hated the rigid legs and feet he worked on all day, and had utterly despised his own bogus limb. In the overcrowded and often panic-stricken hospitals at the Front, each sloppy amputation had been sloppy in a manner all its own. The result was that to each order that reached the workers was attached a complicated and in some cases unreadable set of measurements, which somehow would have to be transformed into a three-dimensional form. After a day filled with the problems of construction geometry, bad meals served in the adjacent cafeteria, and struggles with inadequately maintained machinery, the young men, Tilman included, would clump painfully up the stairs to the dormitory. Here at night Tilman’s dreams of burning his own wooden leg would be interrupted by the shouts of nightmare-ridden men who had not even begun to recover from the trauma of the war. Some of these same men could be heard crying themselves to sleep after lights out.

  In many ways Tilman had been a model soldier. Used to sleeping in mud and rain, cooking meals in the open air, and by nature enjoying looking at things from a great distance, the army seemed to him to be just a slightly more dangerous variation on his tramping life. (Before and during Vimy he had often been a sentry, usually volunteering for the position, preferring the dangerous exposure to the congested camaraderie of the trench.) Even gross physical mutilation and death were no surprise to him as many tramps he had known had lost their limbs, or their lives, leaping into or being thrown out of moving boxcars—or by carelessness when riding the rods. But he was greatly disturbed by the unhappiness around him, by the meaningless slaughter of confused boys who were homesick in a way he had never been homesick, and he was repelled by the claustrophobic conditions of the trenches and the tunnels at Vimy. But even these dim passages seemed to be leading toward purpose and change, however misguided and misdirected. This factory, this pathetic attempt to patch up afterwards, this effort to reconstruct limbs and lives in a closed space was closer to hell than he had been since the chain. Had he the use of both legs, or even had his wooden leg caused him less discomfort, he would have bolted. As it was, he knew he could never survive his old life on the roads, so he stayed where he was, fed and housed and employed, gradually growing physically stronger, and tentatively entering, for the first time since the Vigamontis (and undoubtedly with some of the skills he had learned there), a community.

  Like Tilman, most of the other men in the factory had nowhere else to go. Wives, girlfriends, in some cases even mothers and fathers had withdrawn in horror at their physical condition. If the men had worked in offices before the war, old employers had claimed they were not able to find a position for them. Physical labour was out of the question. Most of the men were too broken in spirit anyway to re-engage in anything that predated 1914, could hardly remember who they had been before the catastrophe, as if from now on they were to be stalled in a peculiar atmosphere of both stasis and transition. One former tramp commenting on his purgatorial life called himself a limb-bo rather than a hobo. The expression seemed a perfect moniker for the place in which they all lived and worked. Tilman carved an elaborate plaque with the name featured in large letters. It was hung on a wall at one end of the dormitory and was the first thing most of the men saw when they awakened in the morning.

  After two years or so, Limb-Bo became a place of gradually declining activity, and in three years’ time the orders for artificial legs were down to a trickle. Not everyone in the country needed a prosthesis, apparently, and the war amputees had all been serviced. As hastily as the department had opened the factory, they now firmly closed it down. Satisfied that they had done all that they could to rehabilitate Tilman and his colleagues, the same government that had called these young men so earnestly to arms now cast them unceremoniously out into the streets.

  All this was told to Klara as she and Tilman sat at the wide table in the kitchen after a meal of bacon, cabbage, potatoes, and applesauce. Only one small, dark stain had blossomed on the cheekbone under Tilman’s left eye, but Klara continued to soak her hands, having received the worst of it in a battle with only one side fighting.

  “They’ll be all right tomorrow,” she replied when her brother asked repeatedly about her hands. She and Tilman had barely taken their eyes off each other, the need for knowledge was that great. Klara could see in Tilman’s face just vague traces of the flawless blond boy he had been, mostly in the clarity of his eyes that were still a piercing blue and in the shape of his mouth. The rest of his face had changed utterly, was rough, lined, and in places faintly scarred, though whether by battle or by the rigours of the road she couldn’t say. “What did you do,” she asked, “after the wooden legs?”

  “I stayed in Toronto, begging on the streets and sleeping in the missions for a few years.” Tilman picked up his pine limb with both hands and moved it to a more comfortable position under the table. “It wasn’t any good, though, after the war. I wasn’t a kid any more, and there were so many vagrants in the city that people just became immune. Some of the boys pretended to be sick, or really got sick and went to the veterans hospital. Some of the country boys went home—if their families would have them. At least that way there was an address for the pension. I never had an address so there was no pension for me.”

  “You could have come here.” Klara tried to imagine her father and her grandfather’s response to a wounded veteran returning from the war. A grown man with a hardened face and untidy brown hair, not a golden child.

  “I wasn’t ready to. Even after the war, I wasn’t ready to.”

  “What Mother did …” Klara touched her brother’s arm.

  “It wasn’t that I was afraid of that, I just hadn’t forgotten it. I remembered everything about that time, about them doing that to me.” Tilman looked out the window, past the reflected kitchen and deep into the September night, silently recalling his distant imprisonment. “Why did Father let her do it? Why didn’t he just stop her?”

  There was nothing that Klara could say that would answer this question. “He spoke of you, you know, when he was dying,” she said.

  Tilman settled back in the chair, his expression softening somewhat. “But he was part of it … he agreed to it. I think he even put the harness on me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Klara. “But he was filled with regret. It was obvious he was always filled with regret.”

  Both were silent for several moments. Then Klara asked Tilman how he managed to survive with his wooden leg.

  “I was used to it by the time they closed the factory; I got around pretty good. But I couldn’t do the trains any more. So I hitchhiked. The army jacket helped. And the medals.”

  “You won medals!” said Klara, preparing to be proud.

  “Only one, for some supposed enemy activity I spotted while on sentry duty. But one of the fellows I worked with in the factory was so disgusted with everything—the war, the stupid legs, he threw his own medal in the trash. I fished it out later, figuring it might come in handy. You use everything you can on the road,” he said. “It’s part of what we hobos call our professional code.”

  Klara lifted her hands, dripping, from the bowl, stood, and crossed the room to a linen towel that hung near the stove.

  “The Kitchen Queen,” announced Tilman, not looking in the direction of the cumbersome iron contraption.

  Klara laughed. “The stove,” she said. “Did you remember it?”

  “Not really,” Tilman twisted around to examine it, “but I worked in a stove factory for a while.”

  “There can’t be many of those left. Most people have gone to electric now.”

  “True,” said Tilman. “I know a whole family put out of work by that.”

  She gave him their parents’ bed, believing that his childhood room would hold too many ghosts for him. She did not ask how long he intended to stay and knew instinctively he had not come back for the farm, despite the enthusiasm—perhaps feigned—that he showed concerning Charolais and Charlotta and his praise of her success with them.

>   “Do you remember this?” she kept asking the next day. “Do you remember?” She touched object after object in the house as if bringing them to his attention might make their shared childhood come into focus for her, if not for him.

  “The curtains!” he exclaimed, glancing into the room that had once been his and later belonged to his grandfather. “I remember the curtains! I hated them closed, even at night.” He looked at Klara and smiled. “Needed to see the view.”

  “Needed to get out the window, you mean.”

  “Sometimes.”

  He clomped behind her obediently from room to room and then down the stairs to the parlour. Most of their grandfather’s woodcarvings had been commissioned by the church, and now they stood in various religious institutions in the south and west of Ontario. But a few modest figures, a Saint John the Baptist and a Saint Jerome, complete with writing desk and sleeping lion, were kept in this room.

  “How did he die?” Tilman asked.

  Klara glanced at her brother’s face, which had the strained look of someone trying to remember a person they had lost long ago. “In his sleep,” she said softly. “He just sort of wore out.”

  “Good, I’m glad he died like that. I remember him …” Tilman stroked the polished drapery hanging from the baptist’s arm. “I remember him with fondness. I was sometimes happy in his workshop.”

  “He lived here after grandmother died. So he worked in the woodshed.” Klara paused, “It wasn’t quite the same. Would you want the tools, perhaps? He always thought …”

  “I don’t know about that,” Tilman frowned slightly. “Tools stay in one place and …”

  “Did you never carve again? He always kept one scene you had done.” Klara did not tell her brother about the small boy that had appeared in every group of figures the old man carved. “He was always waiting for you to come back.”

  “I carved,” said Tilman, “here and there. In the stoveworks I carved the pattern moulds for the decorative work.”

  Later in the afternoon, Klara took Tilman upstairs to the sunroom, her own bright tailoring shop. He stood in the doorway. “Mother’s sewing room,” he said. “I remember this too.”

  “It’s been mine now for more than twenty years.”

  “So she died as soon as that then.” Tilman’s face underwent a change as the soft line of his mouth hardened.

  “Yes.”

  “And it was because of me. I always believed I would be responsible for her death, one way or another.”

  “She died of a tumour,” said Klara matter-of-factly. “You couldn’t have done that. But she felt your loss terribly, and father said she never stopped feeling it.”

  “He talked about me?” Tilman sounded pleased, but there was still a tightness about his expression.

  “For a while. Then he stopped. The way you do with a dead person.”

  “I wasn’t dead.”

  “How were we to know that?” Klara looked away, unable to keep a brief twist of anger from showing on her face. “You could have at least let someone know you were all right,” she said.

  Tilman walked into the room and leaned against the sewing table, his wooden leg straight out in front of him. “It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them—or you either—I just couldn’t come back at first, and then not coming back became a habit. Not coming back to anything … ever.”

  “Why now … what brought you back now?” Klara was staring out the window at a horizon she had seldom visited, the limit of her own known territory.

  Tilman said quietly, “The business wasn’t going so good in the past few years. And,” he added, a hint of shame in his voice, “I’d nowhere else.”

  What business, Klara wanted to know. She’d heard nothing about a business.

  Tilman scraped and clomped his way down the hall and returned with the sack Klara had seen him carrying when he first arrived. From it he pulled one wooden box, a rectangle eight inches long, six inches wide. On its surfaces were scenes carved in relief. Only the bottom was flat.

  Klara picked it up and turned it slowly in her hands. She saw a prairie with several mountains behind it, a view across water with a tiny “V” of migrating birds on the left and a peninsula on the right, a bird’s-eye view of an industrial city, another plain with a freight train and grain elevators in the distance. The carving was detailed and skilful. “This is lovely,” she said, “and you didn’t even have a workshop.”

  Tilman looked surprised. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never thought about needing a workshop.” He paused. “People buy them … for a dollar. Or bought them. But not so much now with times being hard.”

  Klara continued to turn the box in her hands.

  “I’ve done marble carving too. My friend Giorgio apprenticed with a man who made tombstones and he got me a job there. Giorgio is so good with marble he did all the angels in the graveyard and after the war he got interested in inscriptions. He tried to get me into lettercarving too, but I wasn’t keen on it. I liked carving roses and willows sometimes.” Tilman looked pensive. “But anyway I couldn’t stay, and you can’t take marble on the road. Giorgio could always settle into a job as if it would last forever, but when the hard times came, no one could pay for the angels any more. Last time I saw him he was living in some shack in the Don Valley in Toronto. Him and a hundred other men. He was a tramp, like me.” He smiled. “I told him I thought I’d never see the day …”

  It was the first time Klara had heard Tilman use this term in relation to himself. Her father had used the word “tramp” with some disdain, but he had always given them something, a coin, some food, nevertheless.

  “Giorgio’s an Italian name, right?” she said.

  “Yes. His father was on the road with me when I was younger. But he was only a temporary ‘bo. So’s Giorgio. Only temporary. He’d got a job overseas, or he thought he’d get one, working on some Jesus huge Canadian war memorial that’s going to be built at Vimy, where I lost my leg in France. It’s been in the works for years. The sculptor, Allward—the man who got the commission—is such a fanatic that it took him forever to find the right stone, apparently. Then they had to build a road, clear the site,” Tilman walked over to the window. “That would have been a real treat,” he said bitterly, “sort of like clearing a charnel house.”

  Klara could feel the nerves awaken in the skin of her back and neck. “Nobody from this place went to war,” she said. “They all took agricultural exemption.” She looked at the floor, not wanting Tilman to see her expression. “Nobody but one.”

  “Two,” said Tilman. “I sure as hell went to war.”

  “Sorry.” Klara began tidying her work table in the uncomfortable silence that ensued. Scissors to the left, patterns to the right.

  “Could you use this?” Tilman asked, his voice softening. He pulled a slightly larger carved box from the sack. “Maybe for thread or something.”

  As Klara took the box in her hands she could feel tears entering her eyes. It had been years since anyone had given her a gift. “Thank you, Tilman,” she said, turning the box on the table, keeping her eyes on it, embarrassed by her emotion. “Why didn’t you go?” she asked quietly now, not looking at him, her fingers moving over the texture of the various landscapes. “Why didn’t you go to this Canadian memorial?” There was a tiny bridge, very far away, on the part of the box she was looking at. “I would have gone.”

  “Why on earth would I ever want to go back there, Klara? I couldn’t begin to tell you what hell it was. Think of this: Giorgio said it took five years to remove enough mines from the ground so that it was safe to begin construction. And even so, someone is blown up every few months. This Allward, the sculptor in charge, must be a nightmare to work for. He’s had the commission for ten years and only now is he able to hire the carvers.”

  Klara was dropping spools of brightly coloured thread into the box he had given her.

  “There’s going to be names engraved on it, which is why Giorgio is so inter
ested,” Tilman continued. “But only the names of the eleven thousand who went missing in action in France. Giorgio wanted me to go because he said my leg went missing in action.” Tilman laughed then but did not look at his sister, expecting her not to share the humour.

  Klara was holding a spool of thread in her hand. “Missing in action,” she repeated.

  “Yes, you know, the ones they never found, probably because they were blown to bits. We found some—but only parts—nobody could tell if they were Brits or Germans or even what colour their hair had been.”

  Klara dropped the thread in the box and slammed down the lid. Tilman, startled, jumped up and faced her. Then his eyes narrowed. “You have no idea how awful it was. Nobody has any idea.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Klara said. “Please, just don’t talk about it.”

  “No,” said Tilman, “you wouldn’t want to know. No one does.” He turned his back and hobbled over to the door. “No one over here wants to know anything about it.”

  The next morning Tilman was up early. Klara could hear him below making the fire, the stove doors clanking and the sound of water flowing into the kitchen sink. It had been a long time since anyone other than she had made these morning noises, and she allowed herself the luxury of listening to another prepare to meet the day.

  She had slept late. For hours, long into the night, the man Allward and his memorial had been in her mind, and she lay on her back and whispered the name to herself over and over, terrified that she might forget it. Very early in the morning she had sunk into sleep, and she had dreamt of Eamon for the first time in years, a tender dream in which he had whispered the words “Now you can love me” as they lay together, skin to skin, in the very bed where she slept. “Now you can say it, Klara,” he breathed the sentence into her ear. “Now you can say you love me.” In the dream she thought it must have always been like this, and happiness touched all of her like heavy rain. She could smell his skin and feel his lips brush her face. “You are filled with joy,” he told her. She woke refreshed, as if her mind had been rinsed clear by bright water.