The Stone Carvers Read online

  “No,” said Klara firmly. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll take me up?” said Eamon incredulous.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Don’t go, Eamon,” said Klara. She didn’t want him floating through the clouds, no longer anchored to their own village landscape, to the earth. She wanted to be lying on her back beside the pool with him smoothing her long hair out to dry in the sun, the familiar grass surrounding them both.

  “This is a miraculous day,” he was saying. “What if I hadn’t been here? What if I’d been somewhere else?”

  The pilot laughed. “No miracles happen without petrol,” he said.

  “It’s just a machine,” Klara bent down to seize Eamon’s sleeve as he attempted to scramble under the wings. He had never paid this kind of attention to anyone, anything except for her. “It’s just a machine, but for all I can tell it’s dangerous. Please don’t go up in it.”

  Several small boys had arrived on the scene, gasping with wonder and physical exertion having run across five fields after spotting the machine in the sky. Now they stood panting and chattering. One tried to shinny himself up into the cockpit.

  “Get down from there,” shouted the pilot, “and don’t touch anything.” He glared fiercely in the direction of the children, then turned to Klara. “You stay here,” he said. “Don’t let those little buggers anywhere near it.”

  Klara was silent, shocked. She had never heard anyone use a word like “bugger” before. She watched as Eamon accompanied the leather-clad figure over the fence and down the road. She wondered what was familiar about the costume and the short, thick body of the pilot, and then remembered. He looked suspiciously like one of the demons her grandfather had carved in a Last Judgment.

  The boys were laughing and crawling under the carriage.

  “Get out of there,” snapped Klara. “You heard what the man said. I can tell you right now you wouldn’t want to make the likes of him angry.”

  There was nothing Klara could do to prevent Eamon from riding in the aeroplane, and so while the pilot was filling the machine with petrol, she began to walk away.

  “Aren’t you even going to stay and watch?” Eamon called after her, his voice high and strained in disbelief.

  She didn’t answer but kept striding toward the wood where she had left her boots. While she was tying her laces, she heard the machine start up. The noise shook the leaves of all the trees around her and seemed to leave visible fissures in the atmosphere, lesions that affected Klara’s vision in a disturbing way, making her believe that she would never see anything whole again. As the aeroplane brushed over the top-most branches, she crouched on the ground and bent her arms over her head. When she once again returned to the open, she watched not the aeroplane but the way the children, like metal filings, were being pulled by the magnet of the circumnavigating machine around and around the field.

  Eventually the apparatus landed and set Eamon free. He was in a state of great agitation. “Wasn’t that something,” he kept saying to no one in particular. “Wasn’t that something!”

  After the beast had once again hurled itself into the air and had droned into the distance, Eamon turned to Klara and began to talk excitedly. He told her that everything looked so small from that height he could have held Shoneval in the palm of his hand. “You became so tiny,” he said. “I could hardly find you.” He could see that shingles were missing from the roofs of most houses. Sheep were white dots, cows were black-and-white dots. Old Hammacher’s rows of corn weren’t straight. “I waved back when you waved,” he said, carelessly throwing an arm over her shoulder, “but you probably couldn’t see that.”

  Klara had not waved, she didn’t tell Eamon this, but she had not waved. He had mistaken someone else for her. She had become interchangeable. He could not see her. This adventure had nothing to do with her.

  She remained silent all the way back to the farm, removed his arm from her waist, walked apart from him, thinking for the first time about the separate paths that unfolded behind them and defined their differences: varying landscapes and the dissimilar patterns of their habits, their family lives. It had occurred to her that it might take years or might be impossible altogether to fully comprehend or untangle the complexities of their unrelated pasts. Despite the briefness of their lives, the similarity of the roads they walked each day, the weather patterns they shared, his mind held thoughts she might not even be aware of, never mind interpret. And now this seductive apparatus, fully embraced by him, utterly rejected by her. She felt that if she touched his hand and spoke now, Eamon might not have been able to hear her, the remembered furious noise of the flying machine cooling the warmth of her fingers and erasing each word she would have said.

  In the middle of August and after many fittings, Klara finished the waistcoat. There had been much discussion with Eamon about whether the braid trim should be black or scarlet until finally Klara was convinced by him that he had, indeed, wanted a waistcoat that was entirely scarlet. The evening he came to collect the garment he burst into a room tinted orange by dusk and kissed Klara, first on the neck and then on the soft skin of her inner elbow. She held the coat open for him and he manoeuvred his body into it, then solemnly buttoned the front. The setting sun shone through the window and brought out the red tints in his black hair—even his eyelashes reflected light. Klara had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  He grinned at her and opened his arms, but she shook her head. “I just want to look at you,” she said.

  He walked back and forth across the room with his eyes locked to hers.

  Vanity, she thought but this time with admiration. She had lit candles for the previous four weeks to Homobonus, the patron saint of tailors. She had wanted the waistcoat to be flawless.

  “It’s perfect,” said Eamon, laughing, his face illuminated by the sun.

  Klara felt as if she were bathing in the copper light that drenched the room, felt that each time she inhaled, her bloodstream became luminous. She was practically suffocated by radiance.

  “Eamon,” she said, testing his name, the shape of it in her mouth.

  He did not answer but walked across the floor toward her, removed the coat, folded it carefully, and placed it on the seat of a ladder-back chair. Then he looked at her shyly, as if there were something of great importance he meant to tell her but couldn’t bring himself to say. Stepping closer to Klara, who was made motionless by his nearness, Eamon for the first time tentatively moved his warm hand down the side of her neck, over her collarbone, under the cotton fabric. She was able to see his face become flushed and one vein beating at his temple.

  When his fingers grazed her nipple, she gasped and drew back, frightened by the new nerve connections that were like plucked strings resonating in her belly, her inner thighs. “No,” she whispered, “I can’t …”

  But his mouth stopped whatever it was she meant to say, and she became aware that he was undoing the buttons on the front of her dress, the clasps of her camisole. Then they were holding each other, locked together, staggering against the chair, which overturned so that the splendid coat lay discarded, a prone torso beside them where they fell on the floor. Klara cried out once, in pain, then felt herself sink into an unrecognizable ache of tenderness. She would remember this forever, this act they called sin, her body boneless, some new vine flowering in her veins. And then when it was over she recalled the afternoon they had skated on the ice, how they had fallen there.

  They dressed quietly, avoiding each other’s eyes, private in the wake of the experience. Eamon picked up the coat and smoothed it over his arm. Then he reached forward and grasped her hands.

  “Is it all right, Klara?”

  “Yes,” she said, and then more firmly, “yes.”

  “We’ll be married,” he said. “We’ll get married.”

  “My father …”

  “He’ll live with us … we’ll live here.”

  Klara said nothing.

  “He’ll want what ma
kes you happy,” said Eamon. “Whatever makes you happy.”

  Klara was thinking about the curve of Eamon’s shoulders, the fine white skin there, the unfamiliar dark hair she had seen when he had clambered out of the pool toward the aeroplane, how there had been just a glimpse of it when they lay together. Then she had closed her eyes again.

  “Would you want to be married to me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.” It surprised her now to realize that she’d never, even once, thought about marriage, the future, as if she would be caught in this lush, youthful summer forever. Would she confess this sin? Would Eamon? She didn’t want to whisper about it in the dark of the confessional, and she didn’t want Eamon whispering about it either.

  “We’re in love,” he was saying, the first time he had used the word. A statement? An excuse?

  “Yes,” said Klara, moving slightly away from him, then righting chair, the scraping sound of its legs on the floor loud, intrusive. She was alarmed by the sensation of an unfamiliar liquid travelling down her thigh, that and the fact that the chair and all the other familiar objects in the room seemed altered, arbitrary, and out of place though not one thing in the physical world had changed. Then she heard the sound of her father’s boots in the woodshed. And his slow, steady progress through the downstairs rooms of the house. He had returned from the neighbouring farm where he had gone to buy some eggs and was calling her name as he passed through the parlour.

  “I’m up here,” she called back, only then thinking that he might have returned sooner, and that if he had he likely would not have been noticed. “Eamon has come for his coat.”

  Eamon and Klara exchanged glances, embarrassed by an awareness of a possible discovery. Suddenly Klara was able to imagine the act as if she had been a witness rather than a participant, as if she had stood outside herself and watched the senseless awkwardness of their lovemaking. She felt that she had been ushered by Eamon into a heated adult world where men and women clutched at each other, wrestled, collapsed on the floor. Then the moment passed and they embraced, Eamon burying his face in the warmth of Klara’s neck.

  But the outer world was not to be ignored. “Come down,” Dieter Becker was calling. “Come down and bring Silent Irish with you. There’s news. War has been declared.”

  In June of 1869, when the second Corpus Christi procession had completed its one-mile tour of the church grounds, Father Archangel Gstir rose from the long makeshift table where he had been enjoying the baked goods of his female parishioners and gazed around the cleared acreage. He held up his hand to quiet the festive crowd gathered near him and then signalled to those of his flock seated on the flat round surfaces of stumps left behind after the trees for the log church were cut. When he was certain he had everyone’s attention, he bent down and, with some difficulty, lifted a wooden box from the ground. He turned his back on the crowd, placed his burden on the seat of the chair he had just vacated, and, swivelling back and forth, began to place on the table, one after another, the twenty iron railway spikes that had been brought to him the previous day by a tinker who worked the roads of the surrounding territory.

  “These,” Father Gstir announced, “are the beginnings of our great stone church.”

  Mill workers and farmers then rose from their own chairs and walked around the perimeter of the little log church, pacing out the enlarged dimensions of the imagined stone foundation. Father Gstir paced with them, pausing every now and then to hammer a spike into the ground. When this task was completed, he returned to his box and removed from it loop after loop of red ribbon, one end of which he tied to the stake nearest the spot where the front doors would eventually open to the congregation. Then, slipping the ribbon through his fingers as he walked, looking for all the world as if he were about to take part in a May Day celebration, he tied the ribbon in knots around the heads of all twenty iron spikes.

  That spring enough fieldstones had surfaced under the ploughs of the farmers to make an adequate start at the foundation. The bishop was summoned, the cornerstone was laid and blessed, and oxen, horses, and a team of thirty volunteers provided the labour. By September, the resulting rectangular structure, sixty feet wide, looked as if it were an uncommonly large garden wall enclosing the yard of the log church. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace blossomed around its base; squirrels occasionally ran along its top. Work begun the following spring increased the height of the structure to such an extent that only the braver children were tempted to shinny up the stone walls.

  How long the construction seemed to take! Despite donations of limestone from newly discovered local quarries, and lime from local kilns and sand from local pits, and many thousands of feet of hewn timber from local lots, money was still needed for the sandstone buttresses and the hundreds of running feet of lintels. Sometimes during the miserable winters that inevitably followed the industrious summers and autumns of this period, when snow threatened to completely bury the limestone walls, Father Gstir would almost give up hope. Then, on a clear day in February or March, a messenger would be seen climbing the white road from the village, a brown envelope sealed with wine-coloured wax in his hand, and another two or three thousand thalers would be added to the fund.

  One of the largest of these spontaneous donations appeared during the bitterly cold winter of 1880. Father Gstir, in a letter of effusive thanks to the Ludwig Missions-Verig and to the royal benefactor, described the skeins of snow blowing against the limestone walls and through the empty Gothic windows. Like angels, he wrote, these trailing white clouds look to me like angels visiting our church. By the end of summer, he predicted, we will have a roof, now that there is money for the slates. He apologized for the lack of polar bears, which, he claimed, had moved farther north because of the increasing population of the village.

  In early August of that year dozens of healthy young men—men who in Europe would have made fine soldiers—gathered at the site of the church and ascended a multitude of ladders. In the space of a month, working in the evenings after a full day of agricultural labour, they had completely slated the roof. Each night, when darkness fell, they descended to earth, walked down the hill to Schmidt’s Creek, and threw off their clothes in order to bathe. Everyone in the village could hear the sound of their laughter through open summer windows.

  The same group of young men came to the church grounds in late September. Under the shelter of the soaring timbered and slated roof, by the light shining through newly installed window glass, they began, quite carefully, to dismantle the small structure that had until that very moment served as the community’s place of worship. Then they took that structure, log by log, out the front door of the new stone church, leaving the planked floor, the pine pews, and an altar carved by Joseph Becker surrounded by a margin of bright green indoor grass. The work took all day and was eventually completed by the light of the harvest moon.

  Father Gstir, who presided over the project, was most moved by this last act of labour connected to the building of his church, moved by the solemn expressions on the faces of the men as they carried the past through the doors of the future, how they stacked the timber so tidily in the northeast corner of the lot, where it would not interfere with anyone’s view of the present. It seemed to him as if he were watching time itself being carried in the arms of youth, and as if the pile of logs being assembled in the moonlight was a kind of monument that both celebrated and mourned the receding past.

  No one in Shoneval wanted to enlist. This reluctance would be later attributed to the German background of the village by a simplistic but effective propaganda machine designed to make people in Canada increasingly aware of racial and ethnic differences. The truth was that nobody wanted to enlist because they had spent the Sunday afternoons of their childhoods listening to grandparents count their blessings—the most important of which was freedom from armed conflict. Large portions of the elder population had left behind war-torn Bavaria in their youth precisely for this reason. Even more had
left behind the constant deadly squabbles over Alsace. They had not abandoned ancestral homelands, endured the misery of a pitching ship, battled armies of trees and insects, watched their spouses and children die wretchedly and far too soon only to see their grandchildren return to the battlegrounds from which they had fled. In Shoneval, news of the outbreak of war was publicly discussed for one day, and since that day was Sunday, Father Gallagher preached a pointed sermon on the first commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Afterwards everybody descended the hill to the customary tankard that was always enjoyed at the Archangel Tavern each Sunday after mass.

  And yet one young man with a red waistcoat far too warm for the season had seen something in a back field just a month ago, something that would turn his mind toward the conflict and determine his fate. No visitation of the Blessed Virgin, no choir of angels, no vision of the Infant of Prague could have moved him more than the shuddering, noisy machine that had descended unceremoniously into his life.

  A few weeks after the news reached Shoneval, Eamon told Klara that he felt compelled to go, “and who knows,” he added, “if I go they might let me fly an aeroplane … they will be crucial from now on in any war. Then when I come back I’ll keep one in the barn.”

  Klara’s response was one of sudden, cold fear. How could he step away from her now, place an ocean between them, put himself and their love at risk, and all for the love of an airborne toy? Since their encounter in the sunroom, Eamon had visited her nightly, entering her room by way of the chestnut tree that grew near the window, then slipping into her bed, her arms. His body was her body now; she barely knew where his anatomy ended and hers began. She had learned the whole geography of his bones and flesh, the taut ropes of tendons at his ankles and behind his knees, veins branching from his crotch to his upper thighs, his firm, smooth upper arms, and sharp hip and shin bones. She knew how to curl into the hollows of his adjacent torso, how to entangle her legs with his when she was stretched out at his side. What made him want to remove this physical warmth, this rapture and comfort from her? In the heat of these summer nights often they were so tightly connected by sweat that when he rose to leave he would break the seal their damp skin had made. Was it possible that he who had coaxed her into this trance of intimacy would now shatter it all?