The Stonemason (7 page)

B
EN
I know Baby.

He pats her and she stops crying and sits up.

C
ARLOTTA
I've got to go. I'm going to be late.

B
EN
Did he tell you he's getting married?

C
ARLOTTA
No. He doesn't have the guts. But I know he is.

B
EN
Is he still sending the checks?

C
ARLOTTA
Yes. Yes.

She gets up and collects her things. She dabs at her makeup.

B
EN
Why don't you go back to school?

C
ARLOTTA
I can't afford to go to school.

B
EN
I told you I'd send you.

C
ARLOTTA
I can't do that. God, you work night and day as it is.

B
EN
So?

C
ARLOTTA
You've got your own family.

B
EN
Yes. It includes you.

C
ARLOTTA
Besides school's not the answer to everything.

B
EN
No. But I know you want to go.

C
ARLOTTA
I don't see that it's done you all that much good.

B
EN
Why? Because I work as a mason instead of teaching? I make three times what a teacher does.

C
ARLOTTA
Yes, and I know how you make it too. You're killing yourself. And it's not the money anyway. I've got to go.

She puts on her coat. He gets up from the bed.

C
ARLOTTA
Ben if anything has happened to him I don't know what I'll do. I really don't.

B
EN
Nothing's happened. I promise.

C
ARLOTTA
You cant promise. You think you can fix everything. You cant.

She goes past him to the door. In the doorway she stops and looks at herself in her compact mirror. She closes the compact and puts it in her purse. She looks at him.

C
ARLOTTA
I look awful. Ben, thank you.

She exits.

— CURTAIN —

ACT III

SCENE I

The kitchen at night. It is late and the house is asleep. Ben is sitting at the table with his tea and his notebook. The light comes on at the podium. Ben speaks from there.

B
EN
He's not always asleep when I hear him talking in his room at night. I know his mind is sound but sometimes he forgets and I know sometimes he's half awake or even sitting on the edge of the bed talking to his brother Charles whom he loved and who fell to his death from the scaffolding at the construction of the Seelbach Hotel in the fall of 1902.

He (Ben's double) picks up Papaw's bible from the table and smells the old leather.

B
EN
When they were breaking ground to build the bank out on the Bardstown road there was a piece in the paper about his one hundredth birthday and his letter from President Nixon and they called him and talked to him on the phone trying to get him to lay the cornerstone at their ceremony or whatever it was and he would not and they sent the vice president over here to talk to him thinking there was some misunderstanding and he and Papaw sat in the front room while Mama served them coffee and Papaw was as polite as he could be and told him no about nine times and showed him to the door and Mama was furious with him and wanted to know why he wouldn't do it and he wouldn't answer and wouldn't answer and finally he said: I ain't never laid a block of hewn stone in my life and I never will. You go against scripture you on you own. That man up there ain't goin to help you. Ain't no need to even ask.

He sips his tea and thumbs the bible open. He turns the pages.

B
EN
It took me a while to find that one.

He leans forward at the kitchen table, reading.

B
EN
And if thou make me an altar of stone thou shalt not build it of hewn stone, for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.

He turns the pages.

B
EN
There's another place too. Somewhere here. And all the proscribing of graven images. Why? Deuteronomy. His ribbon here. Pharaoh. We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

He turns the pages.

B
EN
And Exodus. That there may be darkness over the land of Egypt. Egypt and the darkness of Egypt. According to the old charges of the Masonic order the children of Israel learned masonry in Egypt. Which I was astonished to read, having heard it from him, and he knows nothing of freemasonry. He says all honors are empty and none more than honorary masonry. Because there is nothing that will separate from the work itself. The work is everything, and whatever is learned is learned in the doing. The freemasons were right in their suspicion that in the mysteries of stonemasonry were contained other mysteries. Speculatives, they were called. Noblemen who were made honorary masons. And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.

He rises and goes to the woodstove and adds a chunk of wood to the fire and shuts the door and stands looking at the flames through the grate.

B
EN
But not ashlar. Not cut stone. All trades have their origin in the domestic and their corruption in the state. Freestone masonry is the work of free men while sawing stone is the work of slaves and of course it is just those works of antiquity most admired in the history books that require nothing but time and slavery for their completion. It is a priest ridden stone craft, whether in Egypt or Peru. Or Louisville Kentucky. I'd read a great deal in the Old Testament before it occurred to me that it was among other things a handbook for revolutionaries. That what it extols above all else is freedom. There is no historian and no archaeologist who has any conception of what stonework means. The Semitic God was a god of the common man and that is why he'll have no hewn stones to his altar. He'll have no hewing of stone because he'll have no slavery.

When I showed Papaw photographs of Mayan stonework he only shook his head. Stretchers and headers and quoins are the very soul of stonemasonry and of these they had none. Perhaps their mortar was mixed with human blood as in the old ballads. Papaw knows these tales too. He says the only blood you'll ever need is the blood of your redeemer.

He closes the stove door and returns to the table.

B
EN
And the secrecy. Always the secrecy. "Whatsoever thou hearest or seeist him do, tell it no man, wheresoever thou go." That from Guild rales of the fourteenth century. But it wasn't just to protect the guild. The reason the stonemason's trade remains esoteric above all others is that the foundation and the hearth are the soul of human society and it is that soul that the false mason threatens.

So. It's not the mortar that holds the work together. What holds the stone trues the wall as well and I've seen him check his four foot wooden level with a plumb bob and then break the level over the wall and call for a new one. Not in anger, but only to safeguard the true. To safeguard it everywhere. He says that to a man who's never laid a stone there's nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong. The calculations necessary to the right placement of stone are not performed in the mind but in the blood. Or they are like those vestibular reckonings performed in the inner ear for standing upright. I see him standing there over his plumb bob which never lies and never lies and the plumb bob is pointing motionless to the unimaginable center of the earth four thousand miles beneath his feet. Pointing to a blackness unknown and unknowable both in truth and in principle where God and matter are locked in a collaboration that is silent nowhere in the universe and it is this that guides him as he places his stone one over two and two over one as did his fathers before him and his sons to follow and let the rain carve them if it can.

SCENE II

The kitchen, morning. The family has just finished breakfast and Mama is clearing away the table. Big Ben is reading the paper and Carlotta is smoking a cigarette. Ben gets up from the table. He is wearing sport clothes, not dressed for work. He goes to the sink and rinses out his cup and takes his leather jacket and puts it on. Big Ben lowers the paper and looks at him.

B
IG
B
EN
I don't know what use it be you drivin up and down the roads.

B
EN
I'm not going to drive up and down the roads.

Big Ben regards him over the top of his paper.Ben turns up his coat collar.

B
IG
B
EN
What did the police say?

B
EN
I told you what the police said.

B
IG
B
EN
You ain't told me nothin.

B
EN
I told Mama.

B
IG
B
EN
I ain't Mama.

B
EN
They didn't say anything. They just take down the information. They fill out a report. They don't even list them as missing until they've been gone forty eight hours. Then they put the report in a filing cabinet along with about a thousand others, kids that are missing. Missing or misplaced or lost or people just couldn't remember where they'd left them or maybe no one even noticed they were gone or maybe they had no place to be missing from in the first place.

B
IG
B
EN
Carlotta say the truant officer callin up here wantin to know why he ain't in school.

B
EN
Sure. You think the left hand knows what the right is doing? Five years ago they were putting us in jail for sending our kids to school, now they want to jail us for not sending them. I've got to go. I'll be over there after dinner. Tell Osreau to be carrying it up on the back side and we'll set the lintels in the morning. Mama, Bye.

Ben exits.

M
AMA
(
To the closed door
) Bye honey.

B
IG
B
EN
Cain't tell him nothin. Drive around. Where he goin to look for the boy at? Police ain't got no sense. Teachers ain't got no sense. Ain't nobody got any sense but him.

M
AMA
Well at least he tryin to do somethin.

B
IG
B
EN
What that suppose to mean?

M
AMA
Don't mean nothin. Mean he tryin, that's all.

B
IG
B
EN
He just showin out. What's he goin do? The boy's run off, that's all. He'll be back.

M
AMA
Well, you waitin on me to peck holes in Benny you better make yourself comfortable, that's all I got to say.

B
IG
B
EN
You don't need to tell me that. Nooo. You sure don't need to tell me that.

He fluffs up his paper and turns to read, quietly indignant. Carlotta stubs out her cigarette.

C
ARLOTTA
Why are you so sure he's just run away, Daddy?

B
IG
B
EN
He's just that age. Lot of boys his age run off from home. It's just their nature. Young boy like that. . .

C
ARLOTTA
Did you?

BIG BEN
No. But I thought about it. Course back when I was comin up young boys was kept busy and out of trouble. It wasn't like now. Nooo. Sure wasn't like now. I was Soldier's age I's workin a sixty hour week just like a man.

C
ARLOTTA
Uncle Dyson ran away.

B
IG
B
EN
He was a lot older than me. I never did even know him till I was grown.