The Stone Carvers (27 page)

Tilman’s arm dropped back to his side as Klara moved to the farthest corner of the room, her arms crossed and her face red with anger and grief.

Her hat was askew and some of her hair had come undone. She looked as crazy and as vulnerable as the little tramp so popular in the cinema, though she knew neither how she looked or how the little tramp looked as she had never been to a moving picture.

“Ah,” said Tilman, “so you’re tired of your life here. That’s it.”

“I’m tired,” Klara said quietly. “I’m tired of everyone leaving me, everyone going off on the road, going off to wars …”

Tilman stepped a little closer to her. “Who went off to the war, Klara? I thought you said no one went.”

Klara was silent. Then she whispered, “No one but one, I said, no one but one.”

“And where is this one now?” asked Tilman.

“He’s dead.” Klara sat down, took off her hat, placed it on the table. “He thought he’d be able to fly an aeroplane in the war. Father said he’d likely never even have seen one. I don’t know how he died. He was just missing, gone.”

“I’m sorry, Klara.”

“It was a long time ago,” Klara unhooked the top button of the waistcoat. There was a vacant stillness about her now. “A long time ago. But I did it all wrong. I said things, things I was never able to take back. And now he hasn’t even a grave. This Vimy seemed so … I’ve been foolish, I suppose.”

“Not foolish,” said Tilman. “You had a love, is all. I’ve never had a love … don’t suppose any woman would have an old one-legged ‘bo like me anyways.”

Klara didn’t respond. After a few moments she rose to her feet and said, “I’m going to lie down. There’s soup on the stove if you want something to eat.” She felt oddly stunned and empty, as if she would never care about anything again. A weighty drowsiness moved through her blood. She was certain she had just experienced the last of her passion, and she had let go of her will.

In her bedroom she allowed her men’s clothing—the red waistcoat included—to sink like wilted foliage to the floor, and without bothering to remove the shirt or the cufflinks, she closed the curtains, crawled under the quilt, and collapsed into sleep.

A few hours later Tilman banged on her door.

“Okay,” he said. “Time to get up.”

Klara raised her head, alert as an animal. All the sleep had left her.

“And if I die of being on that boat, it’s your responsibility.”

Klara laughed, “I’ll bury you at sea. You’ll become a ‘boberg.” She sat up in bed. “Tilman,” she said, “Tilman, open the door.”

He lifted the latch, entered the darkened room, and was startled by his sister flinging her arms around him. “You’re real kin to me now,” she said. “Until now I was never wholly certain it was really you.”

“It was me, all right,” Tilman said, stiffening. He stepped away from her. Touch to him recalled the cold, hard harness across the ribs, though he understood and was moved by his sister’s gesture.

“First thing,” he said, walking to the other, safer side of the room while keeping his eyes on his sister standing in a shirt that hung almost to her knees, “first thing you do is something about those clothes.” He pointed to her arm. “Somebody would have those cufflinks in a second. You’d be rolled and beaten up. You look like a rich kid, which is worse, even, than looking like a woman. Better tear the jacket some, add some patches.”

“I can’t do that,” said Klara. “Not to the waistcoat.”

“Leave it at home then. Wear some other coat.”

“I can’t do that either. I’ll carry it with me somehow.” She knew it would break her heart not to wear the garment and to leave it behind was unthinkable. “I’ll make something else, fast. I’m a good, speedy tailor,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” said Tilman, “but it’s not your tailoring skills you’ll be needing. It’s your wits.”

“I’ve got them too.”

He smiled. “I dare say you do.”

A few days later they took a slow, sputtering bus into the lakeside town of Goderich, where Klara made arrangements for the passage while Tilman, who had never paid for travel in his life, stood sheepishly at her side in the ticket office. They would take a Great Lakes steamer to Montreal the following week and once there would board an ocean liner bound for France. They had argued for hours about whether to travel on the bum, or whether to book a cabin. In the end they decided to hire an auctioneer to dispose of the old wagons, sleighs, and farm machinery in the barn. When approached by Klara, Kiefer Erb, the original owner, was only too happy to repurchase Charolais, to pay a good price for Charlotta and the calves, and to more or less tend to the old horse. All this added several hundred dollars to Klara’s bank account. The barn cats and the kittens she gave to the good Sisters of the Convent of Immaculate Conception.

“He’ll mate now,” Erb had said, jerking his thumb toward Charolais and winking at Klara. “Now that he has a taste for it.”

Four days after Klara bought the tickets, Tilman boarded up the windows, both downstairs and up, despite Klara’s anxiety about his use of a ladder, and they spent their last few days in the house with lamps lit indoors at all hours. Tilman hated the sense of enclosure, but for Klara the lack of view and the golden interior light intensified the look of the rooms she knew she would not see again for a long, long time, and was growing fonder of as a result. How wonderful the far corner of the parlour, for instance, with its soft cushions, the dark wood of the bookshelf, and the rich warm reds and browns of the books kept behind glass panels there. And how lovely and still the pressed-glass goblets kept on a tray on top of the shelf. All this seemed more mysterious, and gorgeous, and distant than it had during childhood when she had been admonished not to touch books or glass, they being among the few treasures in the family’s possession. Tilman made his way into town and came back with a large brass lock. Then, in the midst of fastening this to the workshop door he stopped, looked at his sister, and said, “Klara, this is crazy. Do you know how crazy this is?”

“No more crazy than living on the road for thirty-odd years. Look who’s talking about crazy.”

Tilman put his hammer on the nearby windowsill. “What are you going to do about your voice?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are you going to talk over there, even on the boat, without revealing you are a woman?”

“They speak French in France, perhaps I won’t have to say much.”

“Klara,” said Tilman. “Seriously, you’re not going to be able to talk at all.”

Klara considered this. Male and mute.

She cupped her hand to her brother’s ear and whispered, “We’ll say I had a terrible childhood disease that affected my vocal chords.”

“All I can think of,” said Tilman, backing away from this physical intimacy, “is a disease that might have made your balls fall off. That’s the only way any man would get a voice like the one you have.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Klara, taken aback by her brother’s coarseness. “I was intending to whisper. There’s no male or female voice in a whisper.”

“You’ll have to do it all the time.”

“Yes, all the time.”

“One more thing,” Tilman whispered. “You better stop being shocked when people talk about their balls or anything else. As a matter of fact, you better start talking about them yourself.”

“I will not talk about such things.”

“Well, you better whisper about them then,” he said.

Two weeks later, as they walked slowly away from the farm toward the village and the bus that would carry them to Goderich, it seemed both terrible and wonderful to Klara that she was departing with her brother, as if he had at last invited her to disappear with him into the world that had so often lured him away. She was still dressed in women’s clothing—the skirt flapped against her shins and wrapped uncomfortably around her legs—and she looked forward to the change of costume, the change of self. Few spinsters would even consider anything as reckless as what she was going to do. She was surprised that her own mind could conceive the idea, could insist that she risk the adventure.

“It is astonishing that we have decided to do this,” she said to her brother now, who raised his eyebrows and repeated the word “we” skeptically.

She didn’t add, though she knew it to be true, that if she had permitted her life to leak away, day after day, in the same predictable fashion, pinning her hair up, sweeping her floors, washing her face, eating her frugal meals, it would be not only as if Eamon had never put his foot on the grass that surrounded Shoneval, had never gone off to the war believing that he was stepping into harmless ether, but also as if his skin had never touched hers, as if her own passion had never existed. As time passed and she had turned from young woman to spinster, it was as if—without any kind of memento mori and with no life to replace the story of him that, despite her best efforts, still held on to her heart—Eamon, his love songs, his hands on her young body had all been a dream, a fantasy concocted by her old maid’s mind.

I
n the future, as a much older and much calmer woman, Klara would find that she wanted to know more about the man responsible for the huge Canadian monument in France, wanted to add to her own distinct memories some kind of chronicle of a life lived, of apprenticeships served, of tasks completed. The opportunity would arise when, after a few decades of almost complete silence, the sculptor Walter Allward once again caught the attention of his fellow Canadians by the simple act of dying. Then, for a moment or two, his accomplishments were revisited and his life was examined. Having read about his death in a small column in her local newspaper, Klara would begin a trek from library to library of the cities she was able to reach in a day’s journey, reading back issues of magazines and the publications of Veterans Affairs, taking notes, examining the indistinct grey reproductions in art books published in the first decades of the century. There was never enough. Nevertheless, the information she would glean during these intensive searches would allow her to fill in the picture of the visionary man she had come to believe had transformed her life.

It turned out that for a man with such an uncompromising nature, Walter Allward had served a fragmented, yet fortunate and by times lyrical apprenticeship. His exhausted mother, able for a few startling moments to look past the chaos of her seven children toward what even she recognized as precocious marks on paper, sent him off for Saturday drawing classes at the Toronto School of Art. There he showed more interest in line than in colour, and more interest in pencil and charcoal when the opportunity to sample paint was given to him. His father, a carpenter, taught him the mechanics of wood construction: the care and use of tools, the importance of measurement, plumb bobs, and spirit levels. Indeed, some of his earliest memories concerned the trapped, quivering bubble of the latter instrument. He might have become a carpenter like his father, but his need, his desire, to control what should be built (and what should not) led him to spend five years of his youth as an apprentice draughtsman in the offices of an architect, until one day he realized that he would never be permitted to draught anything other than brick row houses were he to remain there permanently—a price he felt was far too high to pay for a limited amount of security.

There was a fissure in the brick city of Toronto, where he grew up, a deep, branching wound caused by a river and its tributaries endeavouring to scrape out channels to Lake Ontario and creating, after centuries of effort, a series of interconnecting ravines known as the Don Valley. The nineteenth century had left in its wake a smattering of mills and factories, breweries and tanneries in the valley—some of which were abandoned by the dawn of the twentieth century—but little else had been coaxed out of the wild. Smaller enterprises flourished there in Allward’s time: market gardens, orchards, and apiaries. And here and there one might discover the huts of nature-loving hermits lending to its green depths in summer the feel of Pliny’s country home, or Yeats’ imagined Innisfree.

After leaving the architect, the young Allward descended each day into this unlikely verdant and humming world in order to work for the Don Valley Brickworks, where he had been employed to design and model the terracotta bas-reliefs that decorated the outside walls of the homes of the wealthy in the world above. This he did happily for a few years, using his wages to set up a studio in the city core. Eventually, the incoming commissions for statues of dead young women, elderly statesmen, and various allegorical figures freed him from the brickworks. He climbed out of the gorgeously blossoming valley on an evening in June and never glanced back. Except that it entered his dreams sometimes as a kind of alternative deep space that one could gaze into as if looking from a cliff above water while birds swam in an ocean of air. In some far and as yet uninvestigated room in his mind he had learned much from the valley about vantage points, about edges, about depths. He had learned that a valley can be used by industry, or can be used as a peaceful answer to industry, that it can provide shelter for several species of plants that would not have been able to survive in the congestion and exposure of the upper world, and that much of that which thrives in congestion and exposure would have languished near, or would have itself been killed by the music of nature. And then there was the question of whether any or all of this was worth preserving, worth protecting or fighting for. In his dreams sometimes the little orchards of the valley that he had walked through on his last ascent to the world above darkened with sudden armies.

During the first half of the war years, Allward walked to his studio like a ghost from the past who has no knowledge or interest in the present, fixed images of bronze figures in his mind, his preoccupation with casting larger and larger objects blocking his view of the carnage in the papers and the mourning of his neighbours. As if he were an arctic navigator determined to find the Northwest Passage, he was frozen into his own discoveries, unable to stop commemorating the might of the empire. Commissions had for some time been arriving at his door: a statue of Sir Oliver Mowat, the Alexander Bell Memorial, the memorial to the Boer War. His wife presided over his domestic life with efficiency and pride. He was a great man, still young, and yet too old to go overseas. Their children were, thankfully, simply too young to think about the war at all.