The Stonemason

C
AST
O
F
C
HARACTERS

In Order of Appearance

B
EN
T
ELFAIR

P
APAW
his grandfather

M
AMA
his mother

S
OLDIER
his nephew

B
IG
B
EN
his father

C
ARLOTTA
his sister

M
AVEN
his wife

M
ELISSA
his daughter

M
RS
R
AYMOND
a neighbor

O
SREAU
a worker

J
EFFREY
a neighbor boy

M
ASON
F
ERGUSON
Carlotta's suitor

G
UESTS

C
HILDREN

P
HOTOGRAPHER

R
EPORTER

R
ELATIVES

W
ORKER

M
INISTER

M
ARY
W
EAVER
Big Ben's mistress

ACT I

SCENE I

An old Victorian house in the black section of Louisville Kentucky in February of 1971. The inhabitants are four generations of a black family named Telfair. It is midnight. At curtain rise then is a single light burning stage right where
BEN TELFAIR
sits at a small table. He is a thirty two year old black stonemason. Behind him and to the right is a high basement window and the soft blue light from a streetlamp. Outside in this light a softly falling snow. At far stage left is a podium or lectern at which Ben will speak his monologues throughout the play. It is important to note that the Ben we see onstage during the monologues is a double and to note that this double does not speak, but is only a figure designed to complete the scene. The purpose, as we shall see, is to give distance to the events and to place them in a completed past. The onstage double should nevertheless be as close to Ben in appearance as is practicable and the two should at all times be dressed identically. What must be kept in mind is that the performance consists of two separate presentations. One is the staged drama. The other is the monologue—or chautauqua—which Ben delivers from the podium. And while it is true that Ben at his podium is at times speaking for—or through—his silent double on stage, it is nevertheless a crucial feature of the play that there be no suggestion of communication between these worlds. In this sense it would not even be incorrect to assume that Ben is unaware of the staged drama. Above all we must resist the temptation to see the drama as something being presented by the speaker at his lectern, for to do so is to defraud the drama of its right autonomy. One could say that the play is an artifact of history to which the audience is made privy, yet if the speaker at his podium apostrophizes the figures in that history it is only as they reside in his memory. It is this which dictates the use of the podium. It locates Ben in a separate space and isolates that space from the world of the drama on stage. The speaker has an agenda which centers upon his own exoneration, his own salvation. The events which unfold upon the stage will not at all times support him. The audience may perhaps be also a jury. And now we can begin. As the mathematician Gauss said to his contemporaries: ''Go forward and faith will come to you''. The podium is lit. Ben comes forward to take his place there. As he begins to speak, his double seated at the table onstage begins to write.

B
EN
I always wanted to be like him. Even as a child. I was twelve when my grandmother died and then he came to this house and I began to see him every day and my mother would laugh at me because I had even begun to walk like him. And he was eighty five years old.

Lights come on in the kitchen of the house at stage center. Ben looks up from his desk toward the kitchen—which is upstairs. The kitchen represents the principal set of the play. It is an old fashioned kitchen from the early 1900's with a wainscotting of narrow tongue-and-groove boards, a long kitchen table with chairs, a range, a sink, a refrigerator. An old fashioned wood burning stove. At the rear are two doors, one leading outside and the other giving onto the bedroom of Ben's grandfather,
PAPAW
. This door now opens and Papaw comes into the kitchen.

He is 101 years old, small and wiry and fit. He goes to the sink and fills the kettle and puts it on the stove and goes to the woodstove and pokes up the fire.

B
EN
He's come into the kitchen to fix his tea. Sometimes I go up and we have tea together. Three o'clock in the morning. Nothing surprises him. He has no schedule. Sometimes we talk and sometimes not. Sometimes we talk straight through till breakfast and Mama comes down and she looks at us but she doesn't say anything. He does not need much sleep and I am like him in this also.

Papaw comes back to the stove and fixes his tea and takes it to the table and sits down. On the table is an old leather bound bible.

B
EN
He was an old man before I was born and I have loved him all my life and love him now.

Papaw sips his tea and takes out his little wire framed glasses and puts them on and opens the bible.

B
EN
People believe that the stonemasons of his time were all like him but that was never so. Anything excellent is always rare. He's been a stonemason for ninety years, starting as a boy, mixing the old lime mortar with a hoe, fitting spalls. He has thought deeply about his trade and in this he's much out of the ordinary. His entire life's work lies in five counties in this state and two across the river in Indiana. I've spent a lot of time looking at it. Maybe ten percent survives. I can look at a wall or the foundation of a barn and tell his work from the work of other masons even in the same structure. If we're out in the truck and I point out his work to him he merely nods. The work he's done is no monument. The stonework out there at night in the snow and the man who laid that stone are each a form of each and forever joined. For I believe that to be so. But the monument is upstairs. Having his tea.

Ben sits back in his chair and looks out the high window. Sound of a car going up the street in the muffled snow, chains clinking. He bends to his desk again.

B
EN
For the past two years he's been helping me build my house. Or rebuild it. It's the house that he grew up in. We go out there on weekends.

The kitchen and basement lights dim to black.

B
EN
Sometimes Maven and Melissa come and we have a picnic. Sometimes Mama too. The house is stone and it is laid up in the old style with lime mortar. It was built long before the introduction of Portland cement made it possible to build with stone and yet know nothing of masonry.

Lights come on downstage right revealing the exterior of the two storey stone farmhouse partly in ruins. At the front is a low partial wall of actual stone and here Ben and Papaw are at work together laying stone, chipping it with hammer and chisel, passing their trowels over the work and setting the stone in place.

B
EN
For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God. When the weather is good we gather the stone ourselves out of the fields. What he likes best is what I like. To take the stone out of the ground and dress it and put it in place. We split the stones out along their seams. The chisels clink. The black earth smells good. He talks to me about stone in a different way from my father. Always as a thing of consequence. As if the mason were a custodian of sorts. He speaks of sap in the stone. And fire. Of course he's right. You can smell it in the broken rock. He always watched my eyes to see if I understood. Or to see if I cared. I cared very much. I do now. According to the gospel of the true mason God has laid the stones in the earth for men to use and he has laid them in their bedding planes to show the mason how his own work must go. A wall is made the same way the world is made. A house, a temple. This gospel must accommodate every inquiry. The structure of the world is such as to favor the prosperity of men. Without this belief nothing is possible. What we are at arms against are those philosophies that claim the fortuitous in mens' inventions. For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand.

The lights illuminating the stone house and the workers have dimmed to black.

B
EN
Were it not for him I'd have become a teacher. I nearly did. I nearly did.

The lights come up at the basement desk and window. In the kitchen. Ben sits at his desk. Papaw sits at the kitchen table reading his bible.

B
EN
He never suggested that it would not be a good trade for me. He even encouraged me, although I knew that when I told him I was studying psychology he had little notion of what that meant. Fair enough. Psychology has little notion of what he means. Never did he smile at my pretensions. It was only when I came home after my first year of graduate school that I realized my grandfather knew things that other people did not and I began to clear my head of some of the debris that had accumulated there and I did not go back to school that fall and I did not go back that winter and by then I had already begun to learn the trade that anyone would have said I already knew since I'd worked at it for ten years and paid for my schooling with it. A trade at which I thought myself a master and of which I stood in darkest ignorance. And as I came to know him... As I came to know him. . . Oh I could hardly believe my good fortune. I swore then I'd cleave to that old man like a bride. I swore he'd take nothing to his grave.

SCENE II

Early the following morning. The lights are on in the kitchen and outside it is just graying with daylight. Papaw is sitting in his chair by the stove as Ben enters.

B
EN
Morning Papaw. [Pap-paw]

P
APAW
Mornin Ben. Mornin.

Ben goes to the window and looks out at the yard. There is a small dog sleeping by the stove and it looks up.

B
EN
What do you think?

P
APAW
Well. Be a mite slick out I expect.

MAMA
, Ben's mother enters the kitchen. A bustling and somewhat harried looking woman in her fifties. She eyes them suspiciously and goes on to the stove and gets the coffee percolator and goes to the sink with it.

B
EN
You want to go out to the farm?

M
AMA
(
Speaking loudly over the sound of the faucet
) He ain't goin nowhere with you in this.

Ben smiles at his grandfather. Mama turns off the faucet and takes the percolator to the stove.

M
AMA
So don't you even start.

P
APAW
You reckon we get out there?

M
AMA
Papaw don't you pay no attention to him he ain't got no sense.

She puts coffee in the percolator and she takes down a large black skillet and spoons lard into it.

SOLDIER
enters the kitchen. He is Ben's sister's son, aged fifteen.

M
AMA
You just the man I want to see. Get them plates and set the table.