The Stone Carvers (9 page)

“A good suit is all a woman needs for a wedding,” her mother had always declared. “Anything else is mere frivolity.”

The bride’s dress was to have a line of buttons descending in a perfectly straight row down the centre of the bodice to the waist, but because the gown hooked at the back, these were to be for decorative purposes only. The bride herself would have been contented with buttons covered by the same satin fabric as made up the rest of the dress, but Klara had determined that a little picture, or symbol, by which the day might be commemorated should decorate the buttons. A flower perhaps, or the sliver of a new moon, or an open fan. For all her hidden passion for such details Klara was nevertheless a great believer in uniformity; there would only be one symbol or picture repeated. The choice would be difficult.

On this summer evening then, Klara sat cross-legged on the smooth surface of the large table in the sunroom surrounded by a semicircle of mother-of-pearl buttons, her back curved, her chin on one fist, her free hand picking up and then returning to its place one small object after another. Every now and then she lifted her head and squinted across the room in the direction of the tailor’s dummy and the unfinished gown that adorned it, then resumed her study of the buttons. Years later she would still remember the images before her that night: the profile of a woman, a rampant lion with a marcasite eye, the moon, a star, several flowers, a spider, an apple, a cross, clasped hands, a fleur-de-lys, a maple leaf, a book, a coat of arms, a crown, a ruined tower, a bird, a pair of birds, an urn, a broken column, and a sampling of geometric shapes.

The top of the table that Klara sat upon, though over two feet wide, was made from a single board taken from one of the trees of the virgin forest that had filled the parish during Father Archangel Gstir’s time. This irreplaceable woodland had been felled with alarming swiftness, had been floated down rivers to sawmills, loaded on lake boats, then shipped down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean. There it had been conveyed by schooners to an island on the other side of the sea, an island referred to as the Motherland. As a result of the Motherland’s insatiable hunger for lumber, sawmills had opened all over Upper Canada, had flourished, had made small fortunes for their owners, and had closed and fallen into ruin—in the space of thirty years. All that remained now of the vast army of trees were vestiges in certain pieces of pioneer furniture and the odd oversized floorboard in a country house.

On that June evening, Klara sat on a slice of what had once been an extraordinarily large tree. The evening light moving through the window made an exact shadow of her head and shoulders in profile on the opposite wall.

She had almost decided to use the button with the twinned birds when she heard footsteps on the stairs. At first she thought it was her father, who might be wanting a book from the pile he kept beside his bed, but it wasn’t long before she identified the sound as unfamiliar, tentative. The climber hesitated on the sixth step, then apparently descended to the fourth, which Klara recognized by its creak. (In the future Klara’s foot would never touch that spot again without her mind remembering.) At least a minute passed before the person on the stairs began to ascend once more, and this time the footsteps were swift and purposeful.

Klara knew who it was, she
knew who it was
. And yet this knowledge did nothing to abate the shock of seeing Eamon O’Sullivan standing on the threshold of her sunroom tailor shop.

Characteristically, he said nothing.

“It’s been six weeks,” she heard herself declare in exasperation. “Six weeks—and now what do you want?”

He remained silent, staring at her from the doorway. Klara saw that small drops of sweat had beaded near his hairline.

In the midst of his silence and his scrutiny she felt the old anger returning, and she flushed and looked away from him. She dug her nails into her palm and counted to ten, not wanting to lose control. But it was too late, and she found herself confronting him with her scissors in her hand. “If you don’t say something,” she told him, “I’ll stab you with these scissors. I
mean
it, Eamon. I’ll cut your throat.”

She didn’t mean it, of course, but she was somewhat unnerved by how much she almost meant it. She held the scissors pointed toward him like a gun. “I’m serious, Eamon,” she said. “I’ll cut your ears …”

“I’ve come for a coat,” he announced.

The hand that held the scissors dropped to Klara’s side. “Oh,” she said, “the coat. It’s hanging on a nail in the woodshed … to the right of the door.”

“I spoke,” said Eamon. “I said something.” Klara could see colour enter his neck and climb up his face toward his hair. “But it isn’t my jacket that I’m after. I want you to make a waistcoat for me.”

“Do you?” She was secretly pleased that he acknowledged her skill, aware of the necessary connection her sewing would make between them.

He nodded, not looking at her.

“I’ll have to measure you,” Klara said slowly, the horror of this now entering her mind. Then she looked him in the face with skepticism and said, “You don’t have the money for it, do you?”

He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket, walked across the room, and flung the money on the table. “I’ve been working these two months at the brewery,” he told her.

“The brewery,” Klara repeated.

“Yes, and farming too.”

Klara could not meet his gaze. “What colour do you want then?” she asked.

“Red.”

Klara had never made a red garment in her life. In fact, it was doubtful she had ever seen one, the costumes in her world being almost always black, white, or grey. “There is no excuse,” her mother had said, “for flashy colour. No good can ever come of it.” Then she took the bright pink hair ribbon that Klara had bought with a few pennies her grandfather had given her and dropped it into the stove. “Are you sure it’s red you want?” Klara asked dubiously.

“Red,” Eamon said again with great certainty.

“You can’t have a red waistcoat.”

“And why can’t I?”

“It wouldn’t do at all. No good will come of it.” Klara was horrified. She remembered that while she wept for the burning satin her mother had lectured her on the subject of subtlety and taste.

“I want it to be red,” Eamon asserted. “Burgundy perhaps …”

But he held his ground, was not to be dissuaded.

Vanity, Klara thought, which according to her mother was the most common of the deadly sins, or at least the one most often exhibited in the presence of tailors.

“My hair is black,” continued Eamon. “My eyes are green. Red goes well with both.”

Klara hadn’t known his eyes were green, and was too uncomfortable now to confirm what he was saying. Just like a peacock, she thought.

“Maybe,” Eamon said softly, “maybe you don’t know how to make a red waistcoat.” Gaining confidence from the argument that he believed he had won, he was now able to look her in the face.

“Of course I do,” said Klara. “What possible difference could the colour make?”

“None at all,” Eamon grinned. “So you’ll make it red then?”

Klara sniffed, crossed the room to a set of shelves where she rummaged in a wooden box until she extracted a light brown measuring tape and a small black notebook. “I’ll have to measure you,” she repeated.

Eamon, apparently exhausted by conversation but still smiling at his victory, slumped on a stool at the opposite end of the room.

“Stand up,” Klara said.

He stood.

“Stand up straight.”

Eamon squared his shoulders and thrust out his chin.

Klara approached him. “The first measurement,” she said, “is the neck.”

She placed the cool, flat tape on the back of his neck, drawing it together just over his Adam’s apple. She could feel his breath brushing her cheekbone as he repeated the words “the neck.”

Klara wrote the number of inches in the small book under the heading
Red (!) waistcoat for Silent Irish
. “The next measurement is the bodice,” she informed him as she pushed her thumb against the hollow between his collarbones, then slid her fingers down the tape until it reached his homemade leather belt.

“Are there more measurements?” Eamon asked while Klara was writing.

“Oh yes, many,” she replied. “The next is the width of the chest at the shoulders.” She measured and recorded the information. “Then the width of the chest from beneath the arms.” She could hear his heart beating and, to her consternation, her own. “Turn around,” she said.

He turned.

She pulled the tape across his shoulders, surprised at their width after the slenderness of his torso. “Turn back,” she told him as she wrote again in the book. “Now the arm.”

They were facing each other again. Klara ran the tape down Eamon’s arm.

“Do you know,” he asked, his voice breaking slightly, “do you know that your hands are like doves?”

Klara cleared her throat. “The waist,” she whispered, choosing to pretend she had not heard him and thanking God silently she had never made trousers.

“You,” he said, “with your neck like a swan.” This statement was delivered when Klara had both arms around his middle and her cheek near his beating heart. “You who’ll have nothing to do with a man like me.”

With shaking hands Klara recorded the measurement in her book. In her mind she ran out of the room, down the stairs, across the orchard, and into the cedar woods. “I’ll have to measure your hips,” she said uncertainly, keeping her gaze directed at the floor. “I’ll have to do that for the fit to be right.”

He seemed not to hear her. “I’ll die of this,” he told her. “These words about you running and running through my mind.”

She bent toward him, fixing her eyes on the dark printed numbers.

“And me remaining silent for months and months, tasting the humiliation of knowing that once I spoke you’d be gone from me like a startled bird.”

Doves
, thought Klara, looking at her own hands.
Doves
. She looped the tape around the back of him and pulled it tightly across his hip bones. Now she seemed to be moving in a dream, through water.

He put one hand on her hair. “Your hair,” he whispered.

The panic in her was enough to make her wish for his old silence, her old impatience. Still she straightened and looked into his face. Green eyes.

“Do you never think of me?” he implored.

“Never,” Klara whispered. She was unaware that she still held the tape, taut, at the front of his body.

“I’ll die of this,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth.

Klara found that she was kissing him back and the surprise caused her throat to constrict. She let the tape fall from his hips and brought her hands up to her face. “Why,
why
must you have a red waistcoat?” she gasped, though it wasn’t at all what she meant to say.

Eamon drew quickly away, then began to pace back and forth across the room. “I’ll leave the country,” he declared, “and you’ll not recall me for a moment. On you’ll go with your life, sitting by another man’s fire, while I’m an outcast moving from town to town, desperate at the very thought of you. I’ll die in the winter ditch like a dog.”

He crossed the room and placed his hands on either side of her face.

“But the waistcoat …” she began.

“Is for my funeral,” he finished her sentence. “Make it well.”

Then he bolted from the room and thundered down the stairs, leaving Klara shaking as she attempted to write his measurements in her little black book.

She lay awake all night, flat on her back, sweating under a quilt made from scraps of broadcloth and feather stitched with scarlet embroidery thread. The quilt was much too heavy for the season and she wanted to remove it, but she was immobilized, paralyzed by the enormity of the experience in the sunroom. Her mother’s declarations concerning the frivolity of the female sex ran through her mind.
That girl doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, doesn’t have the good sense God gave a goose
. The few times she almost dissolved into sleep Eamon’s face bloomed on the edge of a dream and hovered over hers until she wanted to claw it out of the way. She was certain the scent of him had followed her into the bedroom.

The thought of his desperation caused tears to fill her eyes. Then, inexplicably, she would find herself pounding the mattress on either side of her with her fists. Where in the world was she to get red broadcloth? She would have to send to Toronto for it, or maybe even farther, maybe as far as Montreal. French people—her mother had disapproved of French people—often wore flamboyant clothes, flashy colours.

She tried to remember everything she could about him—from church, from school—but he had always been so quiet there seemed to be nothing to retrieve. Like her, he had been quick and capable in the classroom, but because he was a few years older, there had not been the usual competition between them. His family, she knew, was a little less tidy, a little less organized, and somewhat poorer than most in the predominantly German village, and Klara recalled her mother attributing this to their Irish background. His own mother went to mass more than was good for her, though Klara’s mother had to concede that with five children there was much to pray about. He had four sisters, all younger than himself.

He had never really run with the other boys, though they had seemed to like him well enough, and he them. Preferring solitary activities and being handy in his own way, he had been a prodigious maker of kites and could be spotted on breezy days far off in the hills with something ungainly pulling like an angry fish on a string he held with both hands. Often his less successful projects could be seen as tattered and forlorn as ghosts tangled in the bare limbs of winter trees. Once, Klara had found a kite in early spring, soiled by mud and half-covered by old snow, out behind her barn.

Klara rolled over on her side and suddenly remembered something. When they had been children, at the time when the whole village had been speaking of her brother’s disappearance, Eamon had told her that he could help her send a message to Tilman if she wanted. She had followed the boy home from school, and had gone with him into a plain brown shed. Suddenly she had been surrounded by the anxious movement and quavering noise of penned birds.