The Stone Carvers (23 page)

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.

Nicolo slipped easily back into the role of family patriarch, sometimes taking Tilman aside to offer him one or another of his older daughters—two of whom had become high-spirited, attractive young women—in marriage. But the girls were too much like sisters to Tilman, and he could never imagine one of them engendering in him the tenderness, the muted passion, he would never forget Ham Bone harbouring for Phoebe—his sole idea of true love. He had thought about love now and then, but could only imagine it for himself as something that would take place from a distance, a kind of courtly worship of a beautifully made far-off object. He preferred the camaraderie of men, camaraderie that was neither inquisitive nor physically close.

As for Nicolo, he now lapsed back into his paranoid negativity very rarely and only when he was extremely agitated. This happened just twice during Tilman’s stay. When massive layoffs began at the stoveworks and many of Vigamonti’s younger relatives and friends—Tilman among them—found themselves out of work, Nicolo became restless and distressed, talked about returning to Italy, to a country where heat was not needed, a country where he could keep a garden all year to feed his family. It was not long, however, before this problem was solved by the second event to cause Nicolo distress.

“It’s not war that has been declared in Europe,” he told the blond-haired and the dark-haired young men one evening in August. “You will
not
have to go,” he said as tears filled his eyes and the boys jumped to their feet with excitement. “You will
not
have to go.”

3
THE MoNUMENT

K
lara had become a particular kind of woman one saw now and then in villages the size of Shoneval. Immediately recognizable as spinsters in both dress and posture, they favoured dark cotton dresses with small prints and sensible black laced shoes. Although they were always slim and kept their spines rigidly straight as they walked down the street, they appeared ageless, sexless, and ill-humoured. If they weren’t school teachers, they often lived, as Klara did, near rather than in the town, on a piece of inherited property once worked as a family farm, the fields of which were now rented out as pasture for the animals of neighbouring farmers. In order to supplement this meagre income these women frequently, as the term “spinster” suggests, engaged in some activity related to cloth or clothing; they took in laundry or, like Klara, they sewed. They were known to have roots deep in the town’s pioneer past and therefore commanded the respect such things still engendered at this time in these communities, though, beyond that, being the end of their line in a society mostly tribal, they had no real social life. They were often, perhaps as a result, very pious, attending mass more than was strictly necessary if they were Catholics or acting as caretakers and cleaners of the Protestant church if they were not. They were almost always eccentric in some way or another. It was now more than fifteen years after the war had ended, and Klara’s father and grandfather were both lying beneath wrought-iron markers in the cemetery behind the church. Her insistence on running the farm alone was perceived to be exactly the kind of eccentricity expected of a spinster, though it would have been interpreted as madness in a widow.

Each morning Klara could be seen walking into town—through heat in the summer, rain in the spring, and snow in the winter—where she quite consciously engaged in a few minutes of conversation with the keeper of Hafeman’s store. This she did because she feared that, living alone, her sanity might begin to suffer were she to have absolutely no concourse with other human beings. Every third day she visited the nuns in the convent, where her desire to tell, or be told, stories concerning Shoneval’s early days was indulged. Then she walked back to the farm, where she carried out the routines of her existence: feeding her three cats, sewing the seams of the current garment, tending to her old horse, and taking pleasure from looking out the window at her own four cows.

She hadn’t so much lost her looks as forgotten them. And there were few in the town interested enough to remind her that she had once been a beauty. Each morning she rose, washed, put on one of those dark cotton dresses and an apron, and laced up her shoes. The mirror was used by her to make certain that no strand of hair escaped the severe knot she tied each day at the back of her head. Or to make announcements to herself about the weather. Once or twice a day, if the circumstances warranted it, she would approach the oval above her dresser and deliver, as if a message of great importance, statements such as “The wind has stopped” or “It has rained for far too long.” Sometimes at twilight the white fenceposts at the bottom of the lane looked like a procession of ghosts approaching her gate.

At night her body sometimes attempted to awaken distant memories, but her mind would have none of it. This was going to be her life, this routine of daily tasks and chores and prayers. Whether she was happy did not seem to be important. As for affection, it was given to her cats, and more recently to the four large dignified animals occupying the field nearest the house—the field she had kept for herself, and for them.

Klara had seen her first white animal in a painting on the side of Kiefer Erb’s barn, where normally a portrait of a perfectly ordinary Holstein was displayed. Klara thought for a moment that someone in the night must have come along and painted out the cow’s dark spots. A few days later the words
Erb and Son
were added above it, and below it Klara read
Home of the Wissemburg White
. (The Erbs’ ancestors, she knew, had emigrated from the town of Wissemburg and so had decided to name the cow on the barn after the faraway Alsatian town they had never seen.)

Klara was perturbed and fascinated by the painting and finally was compelled to confront Kiefer Erb one day in the store.

“Is there such a thing?” she asked bluntly while the man was deep in thought near a variety of roofing nails.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The white cow you have on your barn, is it real?”

Kiefer smiled, always happy to talk about his prize. “Oh, it’s real, all right, Miss Becker,” he raised an eyebrow and exchanged glances with the storekeeper, “but I’m surprised you didn’t notice. It’s not a cow, it’s a bull. A special bull—Charolais—from France. Best breeder in Ontario, I figure.” He paused, considered, then couldn’t resist, “Someone you want serviced?”

This kind of humour was often employed at the expense of spinsters, who men assumed were starved for sex, but rarely, it’s true, were these jokes told in their presence.

The shopkeeper smiled sheepishly and reddened. But Klara refused to be embarrassed. “Where did you get him?” she asked.

“Quebec. Cost a fortune. But I figure he’ll earn his keep.”

That summer Klara saw the bull glowing in his pasture each day when she walked to town, his colour creamier, warmer than in his portrait. Unlike others of his species he showed neither curiosity nor hostility when she gazed at him from her side of the fence. In fact the only thing he seemed to be interested in was the bell in the steeple of Father Gstir’s church. When it tolled, and particularly when it tolled for a long time at noon, the beast would raise his head in a regal fashion and there would be something in his manner that suggested a sorrow nobly borne. Klara imagined that he was homesick for Quebec, a place where, she had heard, there were numerous Catholic churches and therefore, it would follow, many wonderful bells. Most of the time, however, he appeared to be distant and preoccupied, as if he were trying to solve the puzzle of how he came to be standing in an Ontario pasture surrounded by unfamiliar spotted females.

Klara adored him, loved even the soft sound of his name,
Shar - oh - lay
. Interesting to her too were the rumours, soon strong around town, that he had refused to mate. Even his portrait was proving to be ambivalent, the white paint beginning to peel after the second or third of August’s thunderstorms. In early September she noticed, passing by Erb’s farm, that the red paint covering the rest of the barn appeared to have erased Wissemburg’s penis and to have eliminated the words beneath the painted beast that identified his home. Several black spots had been added to his neutered snowy side. On the Erb mailbox there hung a humble sign advertising the fact that a bull was for sale.

Klara was mad with joy, the word “Charolais” ringing like Father Gstir’s bell in her mind. Her grandfather had left her a small legacy, and she happily parted with over a quarter of it to buy the sturdy white animal. The rest of the money she sent to Quebec and soon Charolais’ loneliness was assuaged by the appearance in his new pasture and proximity in the winter barn of Charlotta, a fine, soft-eyed white Charolais cow.

Charlotta calved in spring. Twins. In late winter of the following year a certain amount of incest took place and Klara sold the offspring for what she considered to be a handsome price, trying not to think too long or too hard about what would become of the “wee ones.” Kiefer Erb, jealous at her success, made suggestive remarks all over the village about Klara’s relationship with the white bull, but as no one had the nerve to repeat them in her presence, they had no effect whatsoever on the pride she felt at seeing the animals increase in number and at being able to care for them herself, doing the job as efficiently as any man.

Despite this, in the evenings when she had stopped working in the barn or sewing a jacket for someone else’s husband, Klara could not get over a feeling of distance, a sense that she was not only separated from the community in which she lived but also that she was becoming oddly disassociated from the trappings of the only home she had ever known. Often she became vaguely irritated with one physical object or another, or mildly antagonistic toward a whole room. Those brass candlesticks, she would think, they just sit there and tarnish, or That parlour, what good has it ever contributed to the world? Each Sunday after mass she indulged herself by reading a newspaper,
The Goderich Star Sentinel
or, if she could get it,
The London Free Press
. The wealth of stories contained in these journals both stimulated and disoriented her, making her wish that something would happen in her own life, then making her fear that such a wish was capable of changing her current neutrality for discontent.