The Stone Carvers Read online

  “Don’t know nothing about it, Ham Bone,” Phoebe said while absently rattling the links. “Except think it should be off’n him.”

  “Jesus, kid,” said Ham Bone. “Where did you get that chain?”

  Tilman did not answer.

  “Jesus,” said Ham Bone again. Then he walked back to his shed and returned a few moments later with a hacksaw. “Hold still, boy,” he commanded as he placed the chain on a nearby anvil and began to saw.

  “What yer gonna do about that harness?” asked Phoebe when the chain was removed. “Can’t have Chain Child wearing that harness for the rest of his life. He’ll grow for sure, and that thing’ll break his ribs.”

  Ham Bone sighed and went back to the shed for a smaller saw. When the lock was sawed open and the harness cast aside, the large man turned his attention to the woman. “Phoebe,” he began. To Tilman’s amazement he saw that the man’s eyes were filling with tears. “Phoebe,” he repeated, “where you been these last months?”

  “No place near no hog barn,” she said. “What you gonna give Chain Child and me for that good scrap metal? Also we is cold, and we need some place to warm up.” She pointed toward the shack. “Let’s go in there,” she said.

  Ham Bone leaned down and looked Tilman in the eyes. “You’re mighty dirty, boy,” he said. “You think you could find me a washtub out here with no holes in the bottom? Holes in the top is fine, but holes in the bottom is no good. You find me a washtub and we’ll give you a bath.”

  This reference to domesticity put Tilman on guard. “I won’t stay,” he said.

  “I won’t stay neither,” announced Phoebe.

  “I know that,” said Ham Bone softly. “I know that.”

  Tilman waited until the adults disappeared inside the shack. Then he twisted his upper body and flung his arms and legs about in all directions, delighted to be free of the yoke. It was getting near dark when Tilman knocked on the shack door, having found a serviceable tub. Once he was inside, room temperature hit him like a furnace blast. Ham Bone had heated up a large can of beans, which they all shared silently. After this the man excused himself to lock up the yard and to fill the tub with water at the outside pump. When he returned he placed the tub on the woodstove. Tilman, experiencing warmth for the first time in weeks, dozed in his chair until Ham Bone used his own large coat to make the boy a bed on the floor. Some time later Tilman was awakened by Saw Tooth licking his face. The dog circled three times, then lay down at his side. From their place in the shadows, the boy and the dog watched the adults.

  Ham Bone lifted the tub from the stove and tested the water with his hand. Then he stood and looked at the woman, who was slouching in a chair on the opposite side of the room.

  “C’mon, Phoebe,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You ain’t gonna get at me.”

  “I won’t get at you,” said Ham Bone softly, “but, Phoebe, you don’t smell so good.”

  “I’m shamed by that,” said Phoebe in a voice new to Tilman.

  “It’s not your fault,” Ham Bone approached her slowly. “Let me take off these clothes, Phoeb.”

  “No,” she replied but did not move away from him.

  He placed a large hand on her head. “Phoeb,” he said again as he began to unwind one of the several scarves she had tied around her head.

  From where Tilman lay, everything seemed to be slowed by heat and by the orange light thrown from the coal oil lantern. That and the panting of the dog, whose warmth now penetrated the boy’s left side.

  “I won’t let you take nothing off’n me,” said Phoebe in her new voice, which had lost direction and meaning.

  Ham Bone was removing her shawls, layer by layer. Tilman watched amazed as the woman who had rescued him became smaller and smaller. The dog sighed contentedly and put his nose between his front paws.

  Tilman counted five skirts falling to the floor and still Phoebe was covered by clothing. But her surprisingly long, thin arms were bare now and hung limply by her side.

  “What about that boy?” she said. “He ain’t never seen a woman undressing, that’s for sure.”

  “He’s asleep,” said Ham Bone. He removed a soiled petticoat and a camisole, and Phoebe’s thin, white body reflected the lamplight and seemed to Tilman to shake off the darkness of the shadows around her. As a last gesture, Ham Bone unwound the final scarf wrapped tight to her head and a profusion of red curls exploded around her shoulders.

  Tilman was just a child, but he knew that the woman he was looking at was younger than his mother. And he knew that she was beautiful.

  “You didn’t smell so good yerself,” said Phoebe, “before I was crazy and you was coming in from the hog barns.”

  “No, Phoebe,” said Ham Bone. “No, I didn’t.” He took her hand. “Come on,” he said gently, “come on into the water.”

  “I won’t set right down in it.”

  “No, that’s fine, just step in there.” Ham Bone crossed the room and took a rag from a nail on the wall, then returned to where Phoebe was standing in the tub.

  The scene that unfolded before Tilman was one he would never forget. Years later when he came at last to love someone, the memory of this night would fall like rain into his mind: the gentle tenderness, the sound of falling water. He would remember the way the young woman’s buttocks and calves shone when the man had put water there, and the glistening snails’ tracks on her belly that, as an adult, Tilman would realize meant that she had borne a child. He would remember the tears on the large man’s face as he moved the cloth under her breasts and down the insides of her thighs. And he would remember her utter submissiveness after all her protestations.

  Now Phoebe placed her hands on Ham Bone’s shoulders as he crouched before her and washed first one foot and then the other.

  “How did I get to be crazy?” she asked, her head bent.

  Ham Bone was silent. He wrung out the cloth, and the water sounded like a wealth of grief as it entered the tub.

  “Will you come home, Phoebe?” he asked quietly. “You don’t have to be crazy no more. We could take in the boy.”

  Tilman stiffened, preparing, as always, for flight at the suggestion of confinement.

  But Phoebe refused. “I don’t hold with homes,” she said. “Homes is where sorrow is at.”

  Ham Bone took off his shirt and put it like a nightgown on her as she stepped out of the tub. Then he moved behind her and circled her waist with his arms, drawing her down until they were both kneeling, she on his lap. He pushed her slowly forward, then guiding her chin to her chest he brushed her red hair into the warm water.

  “It feels good,” Phoebe said, “this warm water on my head.”

  “I know,” said Ham Bone. “I’ll wash your clothes if you sleep the night here.”

  “You won’t get at me?”

  “No, but you’ll eat something, and you’ll spend the night here.”

  “If I was to let you get at me,” said Phoebe, “we’d only have another baby what would die.”

  She began to weep.

  Ham Bone held her. “I won’t get at you, Phoeb,” he said. “I know you’d only go away again anyways.”

  The next morning Phoebe shook Tilman awake while it was still dark. The boy scrambled nervously to his feet at her touch, then pivoted in the dark trying to determine where he was. When he saw the glowing coals of the pot-bellied stove, he remembered the warmth of the scene he had witnessed the previous evening, and the fact that the chain and the harness were gone, and he felt light-headed, giddy with new physical freedom.

  Phoebe had covered herself once again with the layers of tattered clothing Ham Bone had rinsed out the night before and left near the fire to dry. All evidence of the young redheaded woman Tilman had seen were gone, buried under cloth. He could hear Ham Bone snoring in the corner of the shack.

  “Hurry up,” said Phoebe. “We got to get out of here before he wakes up.”

  Tilman, not knowing what else to do, headed for
the door, though he knew the man was kind, not a threat. The dog stood watching them sleepily, then, evidently familiar with scenes of departure, groaned, walked in a circle, and curled up at the large man’s side.

  “We got to keep moving,” said Phoebe as they walked through the junkyard. “You stay still someone’ll put a cage on you sure as anything.” She looked at the boy. “Guess you know that, don’t you, Chain Child?”

  “Yes,” said Tilman. “Yes, I guess I do.”

  Tilman travelled with Phoebe for less than a week. Neither one being disposed to changing their itineraries for anyone, they soon reached that inevitable crossroad where Phoebe took it in her mind to head east at the same time as Tilman headed west.

  The boy was no more than fifteen paces away from Phoebe when he heard her call to him. He turned on his heel and sauntered back to where she stood. The breeze had picked up and in the sky there was a suggestion of snow. Tilman was hoping to reach a town as quickly as possible.

  “Just want to give you something before you head off for God knows where.” Phoebe rummaged around in her layers of clothing. “Just want to give you the goddamned Royal Thunderer.”

  Eventually she unearthed a bright silver whistle. “Can you read?” she demanded.

  Tilman nodded.

  “Then read that.” Phoebe pointed to some lettering incised on the surface. “Read it out loud.”

  “Royal Thunderer.”

  “Ham Bone give it to me in case someone ever wanted to get at me on the road.” She laughed and shook her head. “No one ever liked me enough to try. It’s all yours,” she said, handing the object to Tilman, then turning to walk away. “And remember, just whistle.”

  He nodded and began to walk away. Then Tilman heard Phoebe calling him one more time. “I won’t come running, though, not now, not ever.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “Try it and see. Count to one hundred, then whistle.”

  While watching the batch of rags that covered Phoebe’s back grow smaller and smaller, Tilman counted slowly to one hundred. Then he put the Royal Thunderer in his mouth and blew. A trilling sound pierced the air.

  Phoebe stopped, stood entirely still for several moments, her scarves and shawls flapping in the wind. Without turning around she lifted one arm in the air, waved it around, then started walking once again.

  And so began Tilman’s unchained adventures on the road.

  When he was more than likely thirteen or fourteen years old, Tilman lived under a bridge that crossed the Nith River in Waterloo County. He had been walking and running on the dusty concession roads for days, stopping to beg for food at the tidy Amish and Mennonite farms common in the region, a little frightened by the somewhat familiar German dialect spoken there. He was concerned that because he had travelled for so long he might have actually left his own country behind and entered a territory so foreign he would never again understand anything. Once, he had questioned a woman who had just given him a whole apple pie, which he had spotted cooling on her windowsill. “Canada?” he had asked. “Ontario?” The woman had not understood the context of his question but had asked his name. Hearing her speak English, his mind at ease, he ran away without answering, the pie held out in front of him.

  It was around this time that he began to train himself as a runner, understanding that this was a skill useful to him in his chosen way of life. His legs were longer now, and they had filled out some in recent months. They were, of course, along with his hands, the part of his anatomy he knew best, mirrors coming infrequently into his visual experience and often startling him when they did cross his path in that he had so little acquaintance with the boy he saw in them. But his legs, though covered by his patched trousers, were familiar, a dependable place to rest one’s hands or elbows and something to hold on to when crouching in a doorway or sitting at the edge of the road. He liked the firmness of his thighs, the boniness of his knees, and the reliability of his feet—despite his often desperate footwear. And he would never forget that it was his legs that had removed him from the place where he had been chained and had helped him escape chains of one kind or another ever since.

  He ran along the spines of hills, along fence lines, through the narrow green hallways of tall corn. He ran on old settlement corduroy roads where the ribs of the logs on which they were built passed under his feet like waves, or on farm lanes that had a bright green band of grass between the two tracks of beaten earth. He ran on railway tracks, pacing his stride so that his feet never once missed a tie, and across trestles with such swiftness and confidence that he was disturbed neither by their height nor by the moaning sound of a distant whistle. He ran around baseball diamonds at the edge of villages on early-summer mornings before anyone else was awake, back and forth on Great Lake piers at Owen Sound or Goderich by moonlight. While he was in Waterloo County he drifted, once, into the city of Berlin and was seen by a policeman at dawn running down King Street after a good breakfast at the garbage bin behind the Walper Hotel. Having mostly avoided heavily populated areas, it had simply never occurred to Tilman that a policeman would be awake at four-thirty in the morning, but when he discovered that one was pursuing him he ran faster than he had known he could, straight out of the city, heading north until a kind of oxygen euphoria infused every cell of his body, stopping only when he could see nothing but trees and fields, having no knowledge that the policeman had given up after two blocks.

  A few days later Tilman came upon the bridge. Hot, dirty, and thirsty, having run just that morning past the villages of Bamberg and Wellesley and Nithburg, he had seen the river lying like a bent silver arm in a valley half a mile away and had taken a narrow road to reach it, descending a hill so steep that he didn’t see the bridge until he was halfway down the incline. Made of iron girders and shaped like the back of a large animal whose skeleton was being presented to the boy in profile, every part of the structure delighted Tilman. He ran back and forth over its planked floor, across the shadows of its steel beams several times, though he was breathless and covered with sweat. Then he tore off his tattered clothes, climbed up on one of the iron railings, and jumped into the green-brown water beneath, which he had figured would be deep enough for the plunge. Floating on his back and looking up at the sky, he was able to admire the bridge from below, the way the sunlight shone between the planks and how the whole framework sat so squarely on its cement abutments. It was then he realized that, with scrub bushes on either side and the incline of the bank, the positioning of the southern abutment created the perfect shelter, the perfect hiding place, and he decided to make it his home.

  It was a good summer. The view from the bridge was extensive in all directions, hills and fields and orchards being cut into geometric shapes by the angles the steel girders made, and the sound of the water was soothing. Tilman was up before dawn during his first few days at the bridge, skulking around the sheds and the dumps of neighbouring farms to get orange crates for furniture and empty cans and bottles for tableware. Once, he took a fishing rod that had been left leaning against a railing of a back porch. He kept it for a week, then, well fed and filled with guilt, he returned it to the spot, placing two freshly caught trout on the doorstep as a kind of payment. It was then that he first saw the border collie that wagged his tail vaguely as a greeting before ambling casually in the direction of the smell of fish.

  After that it didn’t take the dog long to find the boy, to scramble down the bank and shimmy into the cave Tilman had made for himself. The dog approached the boy with courteous discretion, his ears down, his tail moving in circles. Tilman thought of calling him Saw Tooth but named him Buster instead, changing it only when the dog responded to a faraway human voice calling for Shep. Shep arrived at least once a day, sometimes much more often. No one else knew the boy was there, even though, because he needed food, the Amish farmers spoke in Pennsylvania Deutsch about the beggar boy who was sometimes found with his hands out at their back doors, and the usual attempts were made by women t
o capture and tame him.

  Tilman sat under the bridge all summer watching the refracted light from the river tremble on cement and wood, memorizing the shape of the opposite bank, and listening to the sound of wagons and tractors rattling on the planks above him. He walked the river in both directions, passing by cows and the occasional horse but never meeting anyone else. These outings were considered adventures by him, but he preferred the cool shade of the cave, his view of engineering and of water, and of fragments of woodlots and fence lines. He liked also the way the dog stayed beside him, panting and alert, his ears and nose twitching in response to the subtlest changes in the atmosphere.

  Having looked at the river for so long, Tilman was able finally to understand the language of water: quiet water, and water that speaks. He knew the slow, almost imperceptible sigh of it during weeks of drought, and its more aggressive babble after four or five days of rain. When it was swollen, full of itself, the river was most likely to offer surprising gifts: a perfectly fine and much-needed pair of boots tied together by their laces on one occasion, a toy boat on another, and, as the season progressed, apples fallen from the trees of neighbouring orchards.

  He loved the bridge with a child’s love, the way a boy will love a tree house in the yard or a clubhouse in a scrub lot. But he loved it too in a way peculiar to his own nature, because it gave him shelter without closing him in. There were no impenetrable walls, no doors that might contain locks. Air and light flowed through it, all the landscape’s openness was visible from it. And always below him there was the river, solemnly moving and changing, going somewhere else.

  Tilman knew the river was heading west. At the end of August, a week and a half of torrential rain made it hurry in that direction. Then, in the middle of September, a small punt came bobbing swiftly around the bend a quarter-mile upriver, and Tilman and the dog ran down to the bank to meet it. It caught on a log about fifty feet from the bridge and the boy leapt toward it, delighted by the fact that it had a rope attached to its bow. This he tied to a steel ring embedded in one of the cement abutments, and then he spent the rest of the day gathering branches to hide it from potential thieves. Its appearance seemed like a miracle, for Tilman was aware that soon he would have to follow in the wake of the migrating birds, and now he would have a vehicle for the journey.