The Stone Carvers (18 page)

What her father was implying was unbearable. In Klara’s memory Eamon rose shining from the pool and ran through the forest following the clamour, or stood with his head thrown back as the airborne machine shadowed his glowing face.

“It was an aeroplane that killed him,” she said in a way that was both terrible and quiet. “It’s what he went over there for.” Then she walked into the seldom used, unheated parlour and shut the door. As she entered the room she was injured by the sight of her own live breath in the cold air.

Everything in her wanted her innocence back, knowing her girlhood had gone to the grave with a young man who had bewitched her with a combination of silence and song—that and the shock of his touch. The details of the last time she had seen him ran over and over in her mind. She attempted to reconstruct the scene, change the outcome, to melt, in retrospect, her own coldness. She wanted to make her self open up to Eamon, warm him with her embrace, to hold him so that he would no longer be missing, broken. The thought of his body, torn and mutilated, sent waves of panic through her, then waves of nausea until she burst from the front room and retched in the kitchen sink with the two men watching her. After this she staggered back to the parlour, locked the door.

In the dimly lit surroundings she watched her breath cloud the view of the mindless bric-a-brac and stern ancestral portraits. She listened to the slow beat of the pendulum clock, the stupid progression of time.

The next morning when the men walked into the kitchen for breakfast, they found Klara dry-eyed and bleak, with only one warning sentence on her lips.

“I’ll not speak of this again.”

Her grandfather and her father nodded and sat at their customary places at the table to be waited on by her.

The silence seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room, to intensify the heat coming from the stove, and the men soon departed for the coolness and clarity of woodshed and barn.

Klara then climbed the stairs to the sunroom, where she pulled down from a shelf near the table the brown paper she used for patterns. Lying on her stomach, on a sheet she tore from the roll, she used the flat side of a pencil lead to explore the floor beneath and slowly, slowly a white line in the shape of a pattern emerged. She was worried that there would be a break in the continuity, that part of the sleeve or the shoulder would be missing. But by noon she had it, and she rose unsteadily to her feet with her eyes blurred by tears and the potential for the perfect waistcoat rolled up under her arm. Her hands trembled as she wrote to the firm in Montreal to order a bolt of their best red worsted wool and enough red braid to make the trim. And buttons with harps on them, to celebrate his Irishness. The shaky handwriting on the letter paper looked like that of an old woman.

In subsequent weeks, though she occasionally tried to work on the abbess, Klara’s mind anticipated the arrival of the cloth with such tenacity she felt she could detail each mile of its journey across the western part of Quebec, along the curve of Lake Ontario, and into her own territory. She believed that once she began to pull the scarlet thread through the wool, once she was involved in the act of reconstruction, some of her anguish would abate. But it was winter, and in her brief rational moments she knew it would be months before the brown paper package would arrive.

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
THE ROAD

T
ilman 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.