The Stone Carvers Read online

  The dry old wicker ignited immediately, and in no time at all the fire had sailed away from her and was floating in the centre of the pond. Klara watched the conflagration until it was swallowed by liquid. Then she walked away.

  The last of him.

  Now she believed she was done with it, that she had accomplished what she wanted. What she wanted was never again to be torn from sleep by love, never again to be awakened by grief.

  Putting herself on a rigid schedule so that each waking moment was filled with activity, Klara worked in the kitchen filling Mason jar after Mason jar with preserved fruit as if she were gathering sustenance for a life of constant winter. She also darned and reinforced all of her father’s socks, whether they needed it or not. When asked why she was doing this, Klara met her father’s puzzled look with a steady gaze and said, “Frugality,” a word she knew that he and everyone in their community approved of.

  In the shop, in the space of one week, she had worked with such concentration on the abbess, and for so many hours, that she considered the sculpture to be finished and announced this fact with great satisfaction to her grandfather. But when the old man came to see the allegedly completed figure, he was not pleased.

  “Too hard, too angry,” he said after a long, contemplative silence. “She looks like she’s a fishwife, a shrew. There is no authority in that. No priest would have listened to a word she said, never mind a pope.”

  She thought about her brother, Tilman, how she had given him the means to be free of the house and how he never returned, and she almost understood her mother, for the first time, what had driven her to imprison him. Only the old men could be counted upon to stay, wanting warmth and comfort from women. The young were bred to run away, to flee toward that which was not so easily known: the open road, a piece of machinery, toward anything but the disclosure women demanded of them. Even her father, as a younger man, had left his fields reluctantly at dusk, driven in the direction of the house by various forms of hunger. And once there, Klara now suspected, he would have resented his own surrender to the tyranny of the feminine, so that each morning his resumption of duty was an act of escape.

  It was all one long, exhausting game of hide and seek.

  All over Ontario boys were being worshipped and wept over as they covered themselves in khaki and marched toward a collection of similar brick train stations, part of a massive reverse migration. As if engaging in an act of revenge, Europe had demanded that the grandsons of the impoverished hordes that had left her shores a few generations before now cross the ocean to mingle their flesh with the dust of their ancestors. Blanketed in flowers, surrounded by song, accompanied by pipes and drums, young men departed from farms and factories, offices and banks, schools and churches as if enchanted, their faces smiling and oddly vacant. A fuss of this magnitude had never been made over them before—these farmboys and schoolboys and youthful labourers—and for the first time they felt themselves to be larger than life, a force so sweeping and elemental they were on the verge of forgetting their individual names. The word “we” sprang so easily and so joyfully to their lips that the word “them” would not be long to follow.

  In the small, unimportant village of Shoneval there was an experience of a slightly different nature as only one young man, dressed in a red waistcoat far too heavy for the perfect weather, walked out of town without fanfare, carrying a small suitcase he had been forced to steal from his father’s attic. His mother had packed him a simple lunch but had not embraced him before he left, his father would not speak to him at all, and his girl had dismissed him as a fool. Still, he kept his mind on the sky and convinced himself that when he had won the war in his aeroplane, his father would look on him with pride and Klara would love him again—better than before.

  His path would have been dusty and hot—he might have slung the waistcoat over his shoulder after a mile or two—and as time passed the familiar scenes of his youth and childhood would give way to the similar but less familiar fields and woodlots on the outskirts of the neighbouring towns and villages. Perhaps someone going to market would have given him a lift and he would have shared the straw for the space of several miles with a calf bound for slaughter.

  He would remember that the road he had walked in the dark each night to Klara’s house on the hill from his house in the valley and back again had taken him over the rough bridges of what appeared to be two quick-running streams, but in fact it was the same Schmidt’s Creek doubling back on itself, gathering momentum for its hasty progress past the brewery. He would remember that his father had compared this artery of water, unfavourably, with the little Cummeragh River that ran past his family’s cabin in the Kerry Mountains, a river whose small brown trout had saved his antecedents from certain starvation during the famine. They had been poor, though not as bad as some—their walls were made of stone, not turf. Poor enough, however, that when Eamon’s father had been born into the totally altered post-famine world, there was some talk of him living with his grandfather, a cartmaker in Cahirsiveen, in order to reduce the number of mouths at the table. The talk stopped when it became clear that the old man was so totally altered by years of privation that he would have to come to them to end his days near their own fire.

  And so Eamon’s father had grown up beside the Cummeragh River, and the dark lakes it flowed from, in a landscape of extraordinary beauty with no future in it until, at eighteen years of age, he had walked to Tralee, joined the crew of a creaking, overcrowded ship, and had sailed for Quebec, carrying the impossible fields, lakes, and mountains in his mind when he did so.

  It was all his father talked about, this small stretch of geography, as if it were a woman he had wanted to marry and was forced to separate from. Letters still arrived from there, full of newspaper clippings concerning the recent political uprisings, full of humble pleas for small amounts of cash. These were sometimes hidden by Eamon’s mother because she knew that her husband could not bear to ignore them, and they got by on very little themselves. Eamon had found the envelopes in the attic and had read the contents secretly and, though he was only ten or eleven, had worried about the fate of those who wrote them, knowing that his blood was tied to theirs and that the old country—the country they were writing from—was not free.

  Though he was born in Canada, Eamon still spoke with a trace of the accent that so marked his parents’ speech. He knew that Irish Catholics were not well thought of in Ontario—not now, not in the past. When thousands of them had arrived in the previous century, many dying of starvation and disease, all owning only the rags on their backs, they were considered to be dirty, lazy indigents who contributed nothing but their despised popish religion and dire epidemics to the New World. Now they were slightly more accepted though they continued to be looked upon with mild suspicion, and the campaign mounted against them by the powerful Orange Lodge remained in force. Oddly, it was the German immigrants, the sons and daughters of the country Canada was now preparing to fight, that were held in highest esteem, their cleanliness, blond hair, and clear eyes making them a welcome addition to Canada. Was it his Irishness, Eamon would now wonder, that had set Klara against him, the telltale trace in his voice? Nothing in him had wanted to remind her of his origins in the beginning and this, plus his shyness, had made it almost impossible for him to speak at all.

  Last year, walking back from Klara’s farm, Eamon knew that he had fallen into sharp sadness and speechlessness, and he resented the stubborn authority of his emotions that, each evening, had pulled him toward cold, dark, senseless journeys, toward the gold of the loved one’s lit windows, and then the golden colour of her hair. Once he was inside her kitchen he was, admittedly, grateful for the stove’s warmth and mesmerized each time by the way Klara moved while she finished her chores. Often, though, he had been so uncomfortable that he kept his eyes down and had listened instead to the sound of her footsteps brushing the pine floor. When her back was to him, and while his own hands burned as the chill went out of them, he had
looked furtively at her hands placing clean dishes in the cupboard. He thought her hands were like white doves. Though he had never seen these birds, had dealt only with their cousin, the pigeon, there was much reference to them in his father’s sentimental Irish songs. There was a moment that he had waited for each evening, a moment when Klara straightened her spine and reached behind her back to untie her apron. Everything about her then was birdlike. White doves and swans and skylarks singing wildly over the spot where some unlucky rebel boy was about to be exiled, or hanged, or shot.

  At the armouries the efficient medical officer would inspect, in a manner terse and indifferent, the body Klara had caressed. No one in the room would have gasped, as Klara had, at the young man’s beauty. One doctor, when being told by Eamon that he hoped the military might let him fly an aeroplane, might have smiled benignly at the guilelessness of youth, but this would have occurred absently and without real feeling.

  Klara, on the other hand, throughout her long life, would never see or hear an aeroplane without remembering the pact Eamon had made with the sky.

  The nuns in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception had told Klara when she was a child that, several months before the great church was to be consecrated, Father Gstir had sent a letter to his royal benefactor in Bavaria telling him of his joy. All around me, he had written, the great trees of this wilderness seem to be shouting in the wind like a choir of green angels singing to the sky. I am only one man in this wild place, but surely, Your Majesty, you too would have felt my distant rapture—and that of the landscape—the day the last stone was mortared.

  How long, Klara wondered now, how long after the mortar set did the joy remain? When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction. The features of an absent loved one’s face are erased one by one, the timbre of the voice drowned by the noise of the world. Fondly recalled landscapes are savagely altered; we lose them tree by tree. Even the chestnut tree outside Klara’s window would die a slow, rotting death until it would fall one night in a summer storm when everything in Klara wanted it to remain standing, blossoming in spring, leafy in summer, the only access, she secretly believed, to the window of her former self.

  When Klara heard the rumour at Sunday mass that Eamon was missing, she was at first unsurprised. Of course he’s missing, she thought. He’s been gone … . I haven’t seen him for more than two years. The rumour would fade, she would never have to hear it again. Then, as if a foreign organism had entered her brain and body, she could physically feel an intensification of the passion that—ever since his departure—she had identified as the torment of being abandoned, and that she now suddenly knew to be dread, a terror of permanent loss. At her grandmother’s funeral half a year before, she had looked down into the dark, wet combination of stones and clay as the coffin was being lowered and had turned away sickened and terrified. The old woman’s death had saddened her, of course, but it was this hidden depth of unclean soil being exposed to scrutiny, this reminder that the pretty surface was only a disguise, that brought on her lightheadedness.

  After his wife’s death, Klara’s grandfather abandoned his workshop and farm and moved to his son’s house. The old man’s Virgin of Mercy had finally made the journey across the fields to Father Gstir’s miraculous church; he carved only small scenes in relief now that he was forced to work in the woodshed attached to the house. His grandson could still be found in each piece, but Joseph made him smaller than before and placed him farther back in the picture plane, where he stood distanced and looking away from the central drama as if he had been captured in the act of disengagement from the world. The old man was losing hope, was becoming resigned to the idea that he might never see his grandson again in this life. His wife recently dead, his friend Father Gstir buried for decades, the child of his heart and his hope gone from him, he understood the dimensions of loss.

  That Monday morning, after he had heard the news about Eamon from the proprietor of the hardware store, Joseph Becker returned to the house and paced the kitchen for almost half an hour, his son’s pleading eyes on him. The war had gone on long enough that both men knew that those reported missing were not likely to be heard from again. Young men who had lost limbs, and could therefore not be reintegrated into the fray, had returned to their hometowns of Goderich and Listowel with reports of battles so deadly that afterwards there had been no hope of identifying their lost companions. Neither man could bear to tell Klara, but eventually Joseph volunteered and stepped slowly out of the house toward her workshop.

  Klara had not said the boy’s name aloud for more than two years and she did not say it now, but when she saw her grandfather—grim of face—walking without his coat across the snowy yard, she knew suddenly that the rumour was true, that it involved battles and bloodshed, that her hand would never again touch Eamon’s warm cheek, that she had lost him forever.

  When the old man opened the door and said, “Eamon,” she would not permit him to finish the sentence.

  “Stop,” she whispered, her mouth losing colour, the chisel she held dropping to the floor.

  “Klara,” he tried again, but she was past him in a moment and out the door. In the house, she ran up the stairs to the sunroom, where she searched furiously for any frail bits of Eamon that she might not have discarded: measurements, that one photograph—all that she had thrown away. And then she remembered, crossed the room, and stood for some time staring at the engraved shape of the pattern she had drawn—all that was left of him now—and she recalled what her grandfather had told her about the likeness of medieval knights in full armour being drawn with a chisel on their marble burial slabs. He would have only the traces of a waistcoat as a memorial. She folded to the floor, her hand near the spot where his heart might have been.

  Later, she faced her father and her grandfather in the now darkened kitchen, the one lit lamp mirrored in the glass of a window, and the shape of the window a hard yellow rectangle on the snow outside. The terror of descent—his fall from the sky—had been in her mind all afternoon. And now her imagination insisted on details. “I need to know, was he killed in the aeroplane,” she asked, “or when it crashed to the ground?” She had heard that men shot at each other from such things.

  Her father rose to his feet and walked across the floor to where Klara sat on a pine bench near the wall. “Klara, there’s thousands of them over there and maybe ten aeroplanes. He was a foot soldier. He would never have got anywhere near an aeroplane. I’ve heard his father thinks he was killed by the British because he was Irish. These explanations!” said her father emphatically. “He was killed by the war.”

  What her father was implying was unbearable. In Klara’s memory Eamon rose shining from the pool and ran through the forest following the clamour, or stood with his head thrown back as the airborne machine shadowed his glowing face.

  “It was an aeroplane that killed him,” she said in a way that was both terrible and quiet. “It’s what he went over there for.” Then she walked into the seldom used, unheated parlour and shut the door. As she entered the room she was injured by the sight of her own live breath in the cold air.

  Everything in her wanted her innocence back, knowing her girlhood had gone to the grave with a young man who had bewitched her with a combination of silence and song—that and the shock of his touch. The details of the last time she had seen him ran over and over in her mind. She attempted to reconstruct the scene, change the outcome, to melt, in retrospect, her own coldness. She wanted to make her self open up to Eamon, warm him with her embrace, to hold him so that he would no longer be missing, broken. The thought of his body, torn and mutilated, sent waves of panic t
hrough her, then waves of nausea until she burst from the front room and retched in the kitchen sink with the two men watching her. After this she staggered back to the parlour, locked the door.

  In the dimly lit surroundings she watched her breath cloud the view of the mindless bric-a-brac and stern ancestral portraits. She listened to the slow beat of the pendulum clock, the stupid progression of time.

  The next morning when the men walked into the kitchen for breakfast, they found Klara dry-eyed and bleak, with only one warning sentence on her lips.

  “I’ll not speak of this again.”

  Her grandfather and her father nodded and sat at their customary places at the table to be waited on by her.

  The silence seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room, to intensify the heat coming from the stove, and the men soon departed for the coolness and clarity of woodshed and barn.

  Klara then climbed the stairs to the sunroom, where she pulled down from a shelf near the table the brown paper she used for patterns. Lying on her stomach, on a sheet she tore from the roll, she used the flat side of a pencil lead to explore the floor beneath and slowly, slowly a white line in the shape of a pattern emerged. She was worried that there would be a break in the continuity, that part of the sleeve or the shoulder would be missing. But by noon she had it, and she rose unsteadily to her feet with her eyes blurred by tears and the potential for the perfect waistcoat rolled up under her arm. Her hands trembled as she wrote to the firm in Montreal to order a bolt of their best red worsted wool and enough red braid to make the trim. And buttons with harps on them, to celebrate his Irishness. The shaky handwriting on the letter paper looked like that of an old woman.

  In subsequent weeks, though she occasionally tried to work on the abbess, Klara’s mind anticipated the arrival of the cloth with such tenacity she felt she could detail each mile of its journey across the western part of Quebec, along the curve of Lake Ontario, and into her own territory. She believed that once she began to pull the scarlet thread through the wool, once she was involved in the act of reconstruction, some of her anguish would abate. But it was winter, and in her brief rational moments she knew it would be months before the brown paper package would arrive.