The Stone Carvers Read online

  In his own kitchen Eamon’s Irish father told him that no son of his was going off to fight for England, and that if he chose to do so he would be a son of his no more.

  When Eamon reported this to Klara on an August day thick with heat—when he told her this in an outraged voice, certain of the injustice, courting her sympathy—she crossed the kitchen and slapped his face with such violence that tears sprang into his eyes. “You’re a fool, Eamon O’Sullivan,” she hissed. “A fool and an infant. I want nothing more to do with you.”

  She had opened, had given too much of herself to him. Now all of his decisions wounded her. She watched as the shape her blow had made appeared on his shocked face, the way the anger entered his expression. After the screen door banged behind him, Klara went out to her workshop, bolted the door, and worked on the abbess for the remainder of the afternoon, sharpening her tools to make the woman’s features and the folds of her garments angular and determined. She ignored her father’s fist on the door, and his pleas for dinner. She ignored her visiting grandfather’s entreaties. When she finally emerged into moonlight and heat, even the trees and buildings seemed to shrink under the angry grief of her gaze. As she climbed the stairs to her room she felt the temperature rise. These were the dog days of August, the day’s heat never left the upper floors of the house, pushed back any relief that wanted to enter by way of breezes through open windows. Klara undressed, fell face down on the bed, and remembered with sorrow that just a week before, Eamon’s sleeping face had rested in the hollow of the same hand that had just struck him.

  And yet when she was awakened an hour later by the sound of a carefully lifted window, the sense that she had been betrayed by him returned and she quickly covered herself with the sheet and told him to leave.

  “For God’s sake, Klara.” There was fear now on his always readable face. He held out his arms to her.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, her knees drawn up, her face hidden on the sheet that was covering her arms and shoulders.

  During the preceding weeks she had been delighted by his spontaneous nocturnal appearances, the hint of danger, the melting pleasure she could never associate with sordidness or sin. Now she could imagine that after his departure, shame would enter the emptiness he left behind.

  “We’ll get married,” he said, “before I leave.”

  He had thought it was that.

  She looked up at him, astonished. After this mutiny, this certainty of chosen absence, marriage seemed impossible to her. How could he not know that? Moths were now coming into her room, flying toward her lit lamp. “Close the window, Eamon,” she said.

  He believed this meant she wanted him to stay. He let down the sash quietly, not wanting to waken, to alert her father. Then he crossed the floor and sat near her on the bed.

  A moth had landed on her cheek, but she did not wish to expose even her bare arms to Eamon, so she kept the sheet wrapped tightly around her torso like a shawl, like a shroud. He leaned forward and gently caught the insect in his cupped hands, then quietly opened the door and released it out into the hall. When he walked back to the bed, she turned her face away from him.

  She should never have trusted her own passion, this animal that paced around the edges of her character. She was right to have been wary in the beginning, suspicious of the sound of its first unrecognized footstep. Now she believed that ever since that moment she had known that she would be somehow betrayed by it—even when it had felt like a light, almost transparent being, sensitive to every nuance and current of connection with this young man. But now it had become a heavy brute, tenebrous, unmovable, weighted by dread. This dark removal, this adventure in absence, chosen by him. She almost hated him for the pain its anticipation brought her. Reaching for a box on the table by her bedside, she opened it and pulled tight the amber necklace she kept there, snapping the string, beads spilling across the sheets and bouncing on the floor.

  Eamon had given her this gift. “I don’t want this any more,” she said quietly.

  The bruised, wounded look that came over his face would be recorded by Klara’s mind and would be carried there for years to come. The string of bright beads, he had told her, were to remind her of the twenty brightest days they had spent together, and a promise of twenty more, and then twenty more, infinitely. Even in old age she would be able to call to mind the sound of the word “infinitely,” the music it had made, coloured by the slight Irish accent in his mouth—a word that whether shouted, sung, or spoken sounded always like a tender whisper. When she broke the beads, she had been throwing all the bright days away.

  But now, as Klara shifted and one final amber bead clattered on the wood floor, Eamon stood before her, his face flushed, his shoulders hunched, as if cringing in the wake of a physical attack. Then he had straightened and stood briefly, powerfully, above her in the room. “I can only hope,” he said as he moved toward the window, “that you’ll love me better when I get back.”

  After Eamon had gone, Klara walked through the silent house lighting lamp after lamp in the midnight gloom. Then she extinguished these same lamps one after another, her mind concentrating on how it was possible to control the intensification, the reduction of brightness, how one could make it blaze, then lower the wick, pull the damper down, or how one could let it simply diminish by degrees. She felt utterly defenceless in the face of his desertion, permanently fixed within the dimensions of a house. And all he had to do was walk away. Something she would never be able to do.

  Not long after it was consecrated, miracles began to be associated with the church. There was the miracle of the establishment of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception at Shoneval shortly after the church was completed. There was the miracle of the multiplying congregation as people came from far and wide to see the church and to receive the Holy Sacrament. There was the miracle of Joseph Becker’s continued carving despite the enormity of labour attached to the running of his farm and the fact that he now had a wife and a family. And then finally, in 1885, there was the miracle that Father Gstir had been waiting for.

  The great church had stood for four years on the hill in Canada, surrounded by a skirt of specially planted pines, its splendid belfry visible five miles away, the dark blue of its slate roof echoed by the softer grey-blue of its stone walls. At sunset it threw its impressive shadow down toward the Archangel Tavern in the valley. At sunrise it darkened the bright white sheds that Joseph Becker had built to protect the outdoor altars when they were not being used for the Corpus Christi or other more spontaneous processions. Above the porch, the many-coloured eyes of its rose window looked out over an increasing number of cultivated fields and behind its nave a cemetery gradually grew in size.

  On a clear weekday in October of 1885, Father Archangel Gstir, who by now was reaching the age of retirement, sat on the front steps of his church admiring the staggering display of autumn colour that poured through the air from nearby maples and carpeted the hills that surrounded the village. When the approaching wagon caught his attention, he noticed that it carried a crate so large it could have held a milk house, one of Joseph Becker’s altars, a small chapel, or, for that matter, another wagon. For the first time since the church’s consecration several years before, the good Father experienced the thrill of anticipation. The wagon could be heading to one of the farms being cleared to the north, it could be delivering a kitchen stove to the Becker household, or it could be approaching the church. Soon he had to conclude that the latter was the case, and by the time the wagon reached the lane he was standing at the top of the church steps to meet it.

  Four men drove toward him, two sat on the vehicle’s front seat and the others leaned their backs against the blond wood of the box. They stood on arrival, and after lifting several long boards stacked beside the crate, they made a ramp to slide their burden to the ground. There it settled deeply into the manicured, pebbled path that Father Gstir, just weeks before, had installed in front of the church steps.

  “What is
it?” he asked. “Is it for me?”

  “It’s a heavy son of a bitch, whatever it is,” a red-faced man replied. Then he remembered where he was. “Sorry, Father.”

  After the crate was torn apart by crowbars and a prodigious amount of straw was thrown to the winds, the beautiful bell was revealed, its bronze surface glowing in a muted manner like the tanned and stretched hide of a great animal. It was as tall as the men who had unpacked it and who were now running their hands over its surface and exclaiming with surprise. “It has something written on it,” one of them shouted to the priest.

  “What does it say?” asked Father Gstir, who was standing very still at the top of the steps.

  There was a pause when it became evident that only one of the men was able to read. The literate workman squatted beside the bell and crawled around its circumference reading the inscription slowly and with some difficulty, syllable by syllable. Dulcis instar mellis campana vocor Gabrielis. The man glanced toward the priest. “Is it Latin?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

  The priest’s entire body was trembling. “It means …” he began. His voice faltered. He wiped his brow. “It says,” he continued, “I am sweet as honey and am called Gabriel’s bell.” Then, to the astonishment of the men who stood before him, Father Gstir sat down on the front steps of his church, put his head in his hands, and burst into tears.

  That which he believed he had most desired had finally been delivered to him, and yet he could hardly bear to look at it, scarcely bear to speak of it. The bell stood before him, as enigmatic and beautiful as he had always imagined it would be, wholly itself in the morning sun, waiting it seemed for the ascension that must occur before it could use its honey-sweet voice.

  And yet the priest could not look at this treasure, kept his face in his hands, not wanting perhaps to let the moment of its miraculous arrival pass, not wanting to enter into communion. Father Gstir on the steps of his church, overcome by the emotion of a wish granted.

  But after the interval of the averted glance came surrender to the oppression of the real. When the priest composed himself and raised his face, it was not toward the bell that he directed his gaze, not toward the men who stood in embarrassed silence at the foot of the steps. Instead he rose to his feet, turned his back on the bell, and looked up toward the empty belfry through which a sudden autumn wind was blowing a flock of multicoloured leaves. And after that the world abruptly returned, and he understood that the details of how to manage his heart’s desire were going to have to be considered, arrangements were going to have to be made. The bishop would eventually have to be summoned to bless the bell. Some sort of winch would have to be constructed to hoist it up to its rightful place in the tower. And then it must be maintained, must be made to ring joyfully, or toll solemnly. The very fact of the bell’s presence, the very fact of its solid existence, exhausted the now older but not yet elderly man. The profound responsibility of it. He must cause it to make gorgeous proclamations, to make predictions, to celebrate, to mourn. Gabriel, after all, was the angel of the annunciation, the angel of miraculous pronouncements. The honey voice must continue to be heard through all the unpredictable weather of the coming days, the weeks, the years.

  That night as he sat in front of the fire in the comfortable rectory built for him just one year before, Father Gstir felt himself sinking into his chair as if the weight of the great bell had settled on his thighs and shoulders. He attempted to negotiate the indistinct path back to the Europe of his youth, to remember just what was entailed in raising a bell to its place in a church tower and how the bell should be positioned once it arrived there. Various terms such as “headstock,” “strike note,” “timbre,” and “the flight of the clapper” entered his mind. Sonority, he knew, was something to be considered, but he couldn’t quite remember why or how. He recalled one bell ringer he had known in Bavaria saying something about “percussive grandeur” and then making reference to gudgeons. What on earth was a gudgeon? There would have to be wheels. There would have to be discussions concerning acoustics. Was there anyone at all in this wild country with whom one could carry on such discussions? Father Gstir rose painfully to his feet and walked out into the clear autumn night. The bell was barely visible in the dark, but when the priest’s eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, the object in front of him looked solid and dour as if all of its bronze surface was concentrated on the act of pulling the night’s chill into its bulk. The priest shook his head, turned, and walked despondently away, through the door of his rectory, down the hall, and into his bedroom, where without pausing for his customary evening prayers he fell fully clothed upon his bed.

  The next morning when a crowd of excited villagers climbed the hill, they were surprised to find their spiritual leader neither in the vicinity of the bell nor inside his church. “And so I was elected to look for him in the rectory,” Joseph Becker would tell his granddaughter decades later. “And there he was,” the old man would continue sadly. “His eyes wide open but with no life in them.” A stroke? A heart attack? Who could say, there being no medical experts in the vicinity. On the bedside table was a scrap of paper on which was written in a shaky hand, I committed the sin of covetousness. Pray for me. The bell … Joseph crumpled the note in his fist and stuffed it in his pocket, told no one about it. “But I did pray for him,” he said to Klara much later, “and I did make all the arrangements for the bell.”

  Father Gstir did not know, therefore, that eight months later while the bishop was blessing the safely installed Shoneval bell, King Ludwig of Bavaria, the bell’s royal donor, was forcibly removed from his palace at Neuschwanstein and driven to Schloss Berg. Declared insane and placed under house arrest, the plump and now mostly toothless monarch hoped for a peasant uprising to set him free. But the peasants, though fond of their king, were too pragmatic and too overworked to revolt. So, twenty-four hours later, while Father Gstir’s congregation lit candles of gratitude and said prayers for the continued health of the ruler who had contributed so generously to the construction of one priest’s dream in the wilderness (then lit candles of mourning for the same priest), the deposed King Ludwig walked into the lake at Schloss Berg and drowned. He left in his wake some effusive castles, a number of highly imaginative follies, operas by Wagner that would have never been created let alone performed without his financial and moral assistance, and one marvellous church in the wilds of Canada, his connection to which would be entirely forgotten.

  As if Klara’s life had been an oversized garment that she had allowed to billow uncontrollably out into the winds of the world, she now drew it back toward her solid physical self, fold after fold, then fastened it with the firm, strong belt of her will. She felt that if she did not speak of Eamon’s departure, and if she made it known to her father and her grandfather that she would not tolerate enquiries, she would soon recover from the overwhelming feelings of loss that attacked her late at night and early in the morning as she lay under the covers of the bed in which, until Eamon had come into her life, she had always slept alone.

  She put away everything connected to the boy: the studio photograph he had given her, the amber beads she had swept from every corner of her room, the pearl promise ring she knew was all he could afford. She put away certain articles of clothing she had worn when she was with him: a muslin blouse, a few bright hair ribbons—even the tape with which she had measured him and the scissors with which she had cut the red cloth. She pulled her yellow hair severely, almost painfully, back from her face and wound it into a knot at the base of her neck in response to her knowledge that Eamon had liked her to wear it falling down her back. She rearranged the furniture in her room and placed the bed so that she could no longer see the window. And still she could not forget how the young woman she had been just months ago always moved into the part of the bed that still held Eamon’s warmth after he had crept out that same window.

  One morning in late September, Klara rummaged in the attic until she found a picnic basket that h
ad come into her mind when she had lain awake the previous night. She picked it up and carried it with her out of the house, away from the farm. She climbed up to the church and passed through the iron forest of the cemetery just as the bell with the voice of honey tolled ten o’clock. Not even stopping to glance at her mother’s grave she continued through the cemetery’s back gate and down a sharp incline toward the kettle pond where she and Eamon had collided and where she had first felt the warmth of his neck at her wrist. Over half a year later they had picnicked at this spot, though neither of them had ever spoken of the winter day, the ice, the fall. The food they had eaten had been carried in the basket Klara now held with two arms in front of her, as if it were a burden much heavier than it was.

  This was to be the last of him.

  She placed the basket on the water. It floated easily, bobbing near the shore, surrounded by the bright circular ripples caused by its own round shape touching the water.

  From her pocket she removed a small matchbox. She struck one match against the side and held it against the basket. For a moment she thought about how inconsequential fire appeared to be in the full brunt of sunlight. Barely visible in the glare that knifed toward her from the water, it illuminated nothing and threw no shadows. Love was like that, she told herself, just like that, when you looked at it in the ordinary light of day.

  “Remember this, Klara,” she whispered aloud.