The Stone Carvers Read online

  She didn’t burn it, of course, but during the next few days she moved it from one hiding place to another, all over the house. First she wedged it behind the tin boxes in the pantry, then among her underclothes in the upper drawer of her bedroom dresser. One afternoon she secreted it in the wooden lap desk that had belonged to her mother. At each change of location, against her better judgment, she allowed the book to open to one page. No life have I, no liberty, she read, for love is lord of all, and She slipped away from me, with one star awake, as the swans in the evening move over the lake. She knew she was like a small frantic animal desperately moving from place to place with an acorn, and the analogy did not please her at all. She wanted her uncomplicated life back. Each time she opened her workshop door, the abbess scowled at her in disapproval. In her sunroom, she finished the bridal dress listlessly, paying little attention to the joy expressed later by the young woman who came to fetch and pay for the finished product.

  A week after she found the book, a bolt of fine red worsted material arrived from Montreal. This pleased Klara more than she would have liked to admit, and she walked home from the post office with the brown paper parcel clasped like a large tablet against her chest. This waistcoat would be a worthwhile endeavour; she would make it beautiful, if only to be finished with it and finished with the one who had demanded it.

  She had seen Eamon two days before as she passed in front of the brewery (and while she was still under the book’s influence). The minstrel boy has gone to war, she had read earlier in the morning, in the ranks of death you’ll find him, and then, O false are the vows of woman kind, but fair is their fair bodie, I would ne’re wud ha’ trod on Irish ground, had it not been for love of thee. The combined fragments of the two songs had had a dire effect on her disposition, had made it impossible for her to concentrate at all. She had walked, mesmerized, out of the house and down the road toward the village. I’ll die of this, she remembered Eamon saying. In the ranks of death you’ll find him, she thought, in the winter ditch like a dog. The small round pools the villagers called kettles shone in the basins of distant green hills. The shadows of leaves shook on the edges of the dusty road. Klara staggered under her sadness as if afflicted by a startling illness or sudden deformity, an inexplicable crippling. Yet she was at a loss as to how to console either herself or him, the one she now knew was drowning in sorrow. She couldn’t prevent herself from imagining her own hand touching the side of Eamon’s grieving face.

  As she passed through the village, she saw him outside the brewery, happy in the company of some other young men, his head thrown back, his laughter filling the air. And he didn’t notice her at all. He had tricked her, she decided, everything he had done was part of some cold, cruel game that he could now laugh at with his friends. She felt her own coldness return then, and the wish that she had never come to know him.

  And now today, coming back to the house with the bolt of cloth hugged close to her body, Klara hardly expected to see Eamon sitting on the stoop of the woodshed, but there he was. He brightened when he saw her, but she remembered his utter unawareness of her when he was with his friends and she brushed by him, her skirt sweeping over his shoulder. He stood, then followed her through the door into the kitchen.

  “You have something of mine, I think,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, laying the parcel on the table, keeping her back to him. “Yes,” she said again, “the cloth came today.”

  He placed his white hand on the brown package. “I mean my book.”

  “Oh it’s yours, is it? I wondered.” Klara was very busy now, moving randomly from place to place in the kitchen. “So how did it come to be in the workshop then?”

  “I put it there.”

  Klara shook the blue tablecloth in the space between them. “Why would you do that, I wonder? Well, it’s gone now.” She couldn’t look at him. “I burned it.”

  “You burned it?” Eamon sat slowly down in her father’s chair at the end of the table.

  “It was just lying there. Whoever owned it seemed to have thrown it away.” Klara glanced furtively in Eamon’s direction.

  He looked stricken. “They were my father’s songs—the ones he remembered from Ireland. I wrote them down for him because he didn’t know how.”

  Silence. Klara noted his paleness and softened. He was looking at the floor, then back toward her with confusion in his eyes. “My father’s songs from Ireland,” he repeated. “I’d made a cover for them, of leather.”

  “Eamon,” Klara walked closer to where he was sitting, put one hand on his shoulder. “Eamon, I didn’t burn the book.”

  Eamon looked up at her, his expression relieved but still wretched. Then seeing the beginnings of tenderness in her, he visibly relaxed.

  “I didn’t burn it, but I couldn’t read those songs.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she moved one hand in an agitated way through her hair. “Because,” she swung away from him, opened the lid, and shoved some kindling, for no reason, into the stove that was not lit in this season.

  “Because?” he prompted.

  She threw her arms down to her sides. “Eamon, how could I read them with all that suffering and dying for love?” He smiled. “Then you did read them.”

  “Only bits. Why was there so much unhappiness in them?”

  “Love,” said Eamon definitively.

  “And people die of it?”

  “Only when its unreturned, and even then sometimes they just drink a great deal instead of dying. Or they write poems. Or they sing those songs and drink at the same time.”

  He told her then that his father had songs about the Cummeragh struth and about another, larger river called the Aoine, and in each song the singer was torn with grief at having to leave behind the banks of these streams, parents, friends, and green fields. Mostly the songs blamed the tyranny of the landlords, the British Empire, and swore allegiance to the cause of freeing the beloved and shortly to be abandoned country, the country and the Empire that had caused his father’s anger. But sometimes the exile was connected to a passion for an unapproachable woman, a passion so hopeless it became a sweet sorrow in itself, an unrequited romance the only resolution of which was the impossible death of love.

  Klara was quiet, then she said very softly, “Is that why you said you’d die in the ditch like a dog, that you’d leave the country …”

  “Sometimes I feel like a dog,” he said darkly.

  “A laughing dog,” said Klara, flushing at the memory. “I saw you laughing, Eamon, with your friends outside the brewery. I think you’d forgotten me altogether, that’s what I think.”

  He wrapped his arm around her waist, and the slight weight and warmth of this was telegraphed to every cell of her skin, a bewildering rush of apprehension and pleasure.

  This was the way it was going to be then, this road she was going to have to walk. She would be always thinking of him so that he would be beside her even when he wasn’t there, making her joyous or miserable, but always, always controlling the colour of her days. Klara, who since Tilman’s departure and her mother’s collapse had been a singular being, was now terrified by how this one person could so utterly disarm her, cause her emotions to swing in all directions. Yet there it was, and she could feel herself falling, straight through the fear, toward him.

  Years later Klara would tell a middle-aged man who listened carefully to each word she said that at that moment Eamon had waltzed with her in the kitchen, such was his happiness at seeing the misery on her face, misery that told him she had fallen in love with him. It was right then that the young man had pledged himself to her, right then that he had used the words “forever more.” It was an odd moment, Klara would explain to the large, grey-haired man—the misery, the joy, the words, the waltz, the sudden knowledge that the possibility of pain would be part of their communion.

  Now she walked into the parlour, removed the book from a dresser drawer, returned to the kitchen. Bringing the leath
er up to her face, its smoothness against her cheek, she inhaled the animal scent, then placed the volume in Eamon’s hands. “I’ll read more later,” she said, her hands and voice trembling, “when I can.”

  What she never admitted, not to the grey-haired man, not to herself, not to anyone, was that there had never been a waltz, there had never even been a declaration, that all the pain and delight she later thought of as dancing was made known to her simply by the expression on the young man’s open face.

  June of 1914 was followed by a summer of beauty, warmth, and calm—a summer that would be mythologized all over the western world in the years to come. In Shoneval, insects attacked not one green leaf of the swiftly growing crops, animals fattened in dew-soaked pastures, parishioners attended mass regularly and confession infrequently (there being, apparently, few sins to confess). The brewery prospered, the nuns embroidered, and the Archangel Tavern developed a clientele—Eamon among them—of fine singers and fiddle and accordion players. Several new artesian wells and springs were discovered. The dissolute bell ringer at the church became surprisingly punctual. Hafeman’s store extended its terms of credit. Despite the fact that almost everyone distrusted them, three telephones were installed in the district.

  Klara worked in the mornings on the wooden abbess and during the afternoons on the waistcoat promised to Eamon. In the evenings she walked out with him down dusty roads, or through orchards, or across the cemetery. Often he was silent, as was his nature, but now they remained physically close, hands and shoulders touching or with his arm across her shoulders, so that quietness became a connection rather than a separation. Occasionally they would sit facing each other on a log as if it were a seesaw, as if they were small children, their hands flat on the bark, their eyes locked, entranced.

  Eamon was a beautiful young man. Klara loved each detail of his face, the fringe of black eyelashes and the perfectly shaped eyebrows that some might say were wasted on a boy. The unblemished jewels of his green eyes, the fine pale skin lightly dusted by freckles, the small white scar on his temple, and his full, expressive mouth. She had leaned forward once to touch his lips lightly with her fingers as if they were unusual flowers she had discovered and wanted to remember the texture of. He had taken her hand then and kissed her palm, her wrist, a gesture surprisingly mature and tender in one so young, so new to the experience of romance.

  Sometimes he talked about his father’s homeland, how its spirit had been broken by the English, or how his parents worried about the abandoned cabins of their childhood, knowing the thatch would be gone from them by now. “When the thatch goes,” Eamon told Klara, “even stone walls begin to fall into ruin. How sad those walls must be, and so many of them. People who have to leave, they just open the door to the wind and walk away. Soon after the gales bring rain into the house.”

  By July it seemed that every one of Klara’s senses had opened to the light of the long, long days. The scent of freshly chiselled wood in the shop, or of cloth in the sunroom, the taste of salt on new potatoes, the coolness of a damp cloth on her neck in the morning. In the church there was the smell of incense, the buttery glow of candles, blocks of geometric light richly coloured by stained glass, and the precision of white altar cloths. All this gave her joy. But, shaken by the thrill of this boy’s touch, she was vulnerable now to things that in the past she might have ignored. Anything at all, a sharp word from her father, the sight of a newborn calf, even a flower wilting on a stem, could bring tears to her eyes.

  In her workshop, the face of the abbess softened to such an extent that Klara’s grandfather became concerned.

  “This abbess,” he said, “is too young. And far too cheerful. She looks as if she has spent most of her short life dreaming in a field of flowers. No man would accept advice from her. No pope would listen to her for one minute!”

  Klara was stung by this criticism, but only briefly, and the tears cleared in minutes. All the rest of the day she was thinking of the moments when Eamon’s arm was on her shoulder or his hands were in her hair.

  Late on certain afternoons, after work, Eamon and Klara would remove shoes and stockings and step into the bed of the clear-running creek that drove the machinery of the brewery; Eamon with his pant legs rolled up and Klara carrying her skirt in front of her thighs as if it were a sheaf of wheat. They followed the path of the water into an area surrounded by thick brush and cedar, lifting their legs over fallen logs and pushing aside the branches of aspen and poplar that grew near the bank.

  Eventually they would reach a series of pools, each slightly larger than the last. The final pond, which had water deep enough for swimming, was ringed by willows around its circular edge. Eamon, covered with sweat from work, would immediately throw off his clothing, then would flail with much splashing into the water. Klara, shyer, removed her own clothes on a bank behind a willow and stepped into a deep area protected by a curtain of green leaves where Eamon was unable to see her.

  “I’m coming in there,” Eamon would tease. Then he would dive under the surface and emerge in a fountain of water, claiming that he had glimpsed Klara’s legs. She lay on her back and looked up through soft green, or she stood waist-deep in the water and floated her open hands on a dark surface covered with echoes of light. The shadows of leaves were like bruises on her skin.

  There was a kind of communion in this separate baptism. Though they couldn’t see each other or touch, they were connected by the pool and by laughter, by the pleasure of the chilled water on warm skin, the shadows, the breeze. Later, as a mature adult, Klara would never swim, fearing the memory of this joy. But now when they scrambled from the water and dressed in their private green worlds, it would be as if they were preparing themselves for some inevitable, profound ceremony, a reunion of partnership. Eamon would shake his head like a young animal to remove moisture from his hair and then lean down to where Klara was lying on the bank to smooth out her long yellow mane to dry on the grass. They never knew how they had decided upon this daily ritual, but it became a necessary luxury, a significant part of their unspoken code.

  On one such day as she stood in her green water hut, a startled Klara, hands held to her head to protect herself from the noise, watched between two long strands of willow as Eamon, who had just entered the pond, threw his head back and looked at the sky, his face lit by the full flood of the sun and then covered briefly by a swift, clamorous shadow that changed for the space of a breath the colour of his skin and the colour of the pond. She continued to stare as he climbed swiftly up the bank, struggled unselfconsciously into his trousers, unknowingly permitting Klara her first full view of his oddly delicate naked self. She remained, shivering, behind the green shield, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts, having registered the places where his black tufted hair interrupted white skin and how his sex shone between his legs. Then she moved quickly toward her clothing and dressed herself as the catastrophic noise sputtered and eventually stopped altogether. A great calamity had occurred, she knew. Something fierce and dire had fallen from the sky.

  Before this day only birds, clouds, the rising moon, the setting sun, shooting stars, and Eamon’s kites had moved in the sky, all occupying air with dignity, discretion, and at least a degree of silence. The racket might have been made by a bellowing Lucifer angrily approaching earth after being thrown out of heaven or the dusky flying monster from prehistory that Klara had once seen in a forbidden book about the evolution of man and nature. This was the first time in Klara’s life that anything other than familiar, comforting sounds had entered her afternoons. And this was the first time in her presence that Eamon had turned his attention away from her. She was made briefly aware—though she hardly acknowledged this—that intrusions from the outside might be capable of removing him, of taking his mind and then his body permanently away from her.

  When she stepped furtively out of the woods and into an open field she saw, near the opposite fence line, two men, one of whom was Eamon, standing beside a contraption ap
parently constructed of sticks and canvas. The stranger wore a tight-fitting helmet and stood quite still with his hands in the pockets of a leather jacket. Eamon, by comparison, was walking in busy circles around the now silent apparatus, pausing here and there to touch some part of it as if he did not quite believe it was real.

  Klara called to him, wanting him to forget about this uninvited machine that had, she felt, already come strangely between them. But Eamon beckoned to her enthusiastically and, as she came nearer, shouted at her in an almost hysterical voice, “Klara … come look … an aeroplane!”

  “An aeroplane,” she repeated stupidly, quietly to herself. She knew about them, of course, but had thought they would be more seraphic, graceful. In her imagination they had been white, gliding and silent, a miracle lifted by wind. This machine looked, as she approached it, more like some ill-designed gadget from the mill or the brewery. And it smelled of grease and filth.

  The pilot turned to her as she walked toward them and explained that he had run out of petrol on his way from Owen Sound to a fair at Goderich. Klara stared at his leather boots, which were cracked and covered with oily stains. She realized she had left her own boots at the pool and self-consciously covered one foot with the other.

  Eamon was running his hands lovingly over the propeller. “My God,” he said, “this is the most beautiful thing.”

  “She could use some tidying up,” said the pilot as he opened one hinged part of the nose. “There’s so many fairs now I hardly have the time. Can I get petrol in the village?”

  “I’ll show you where there’s a tank by the mill.” Eamon was examining the instrument panel.

  “Good, and then I’ll take you for a spin afterwards.” The pilot looked at Klara, at her hair, her breasts, her bare feet, “and then I’ll take you up.”