The Stone Carvers Read online

  Nicolo slipped easily back into the role of family patriarch, sometimes taking Tilman aside to offer him one or another of his older daughters—two of whom had become high-spirited, attractive young women—in marriage. But the girls were too much like sisters to Tilman, and he could never imagine one of them engendering in him the tenderness, the muted passion, he would never forget Ham Bone harbouring for Phoebe—his sole idea of true love. He had thought about love now and then, but could only imagine it for himself as something that would take place from a distance, a kind of courtly worship of a beautifully made far-off object. He preferred the camaraderie of men, camaraderie that was neither inquisitive nor physically close.

  As for Nicolo, he now lapsed back into his paranoid negativity very rarely and only when he was extremely agitated. This happened just twice during Tilman’s stay. When massive layoffs began at the stoveworks and many of Vigamonti’s younger relatives and friends—Tilman among them—found themselves out of work, Nicolo became restless and distressed, talked about returning to Italy, to a country where heat was not needed, a country where he could keep a garden all year to feed his family. It was not long, however, before this problem was solved by the second event to cause Nicolo distress.

  “It’s not war that has been declared in Europe,” he told the blond-haired and the dark-haired young men one evening in August. “You will not have to go,” he said as tears filled his eyes and the boys jumped to their feet with excitement. “You will not have to go.”

  3

  THE MoNUMENT

  Klara had become a particular kind of woman one saw now and then in villages the size of Shoneval. Immediately recognizable as spinsters in both dress and posture, they favoured dark cotton dresses with small prints and sensible black laced shoes. Although they were always slim and kept their spines rigidly straight as they walked down the street, they appeared ageless, sexless, and ill-humoured. If they weren’t school teachers, they often lived, as Klara did, near rather than in the town, on a piece of inherited property once worked as a family farm, the fields of which were now rented out as pasture for the animals of neighbouring farmers. In order to supplement this meagre income these women frequently, as the term “spinster” suggests, engaged in some activity related to cloth or clothing; they took in laundry or, like Klara, they sewed. They were known to have roots deep in the town’s pioneer past and therefore commanded the respect such things still engendered at this time in these communities, though, beyond that, being the end of their line in a society mostly tribal, they had no real social life. They were often, perhaps as a result, very pious, attending mass more than was strictly necessary if they were Catholics or acting as caretakers and cleaners of the Protestant church if they were not. They were almost always eccentric in some way or another. It was now more than fifteen years after the war had ended, and Klara’s father and grandfather were both lying beneath wrought-iron markers in the cemetery behind the church. Her insistence on running the farm alone was perceived to be exactly the kind of eccentricity expected of a spinster, though it would have been interpreted as madness in a widow.

  Each morning Klara could be seen walking into town—through heat in the summer, rain in the spring, and snow in the winter—where she quite consciously engaged in a few minutes of conversation with the keeper of Hafeman’s store. This she did because she feared that, living alone, her sanity might begin to suffer were she to have absolutely no concourse with other human beings. Every third day she visited the nuns in the convent, where her desire to tell, or be told, stories concerning Shoneval’s early days was indulged. Then she walked back to the farm, where she carried out the routines of her existence: feeding her three cats, sewing the seams of the current garment, tending to her old horse, and taking pleasure from looking out the window at her own four cows.

  She hadn’t so much lost her looks as forgotten them. And there were few in the town interested enough to remind her that she had once been a beauty. Each morning she rose, washed, put on one of those dark cotton dresses and an apron, and laced up her shoes. The mirror was used by her to make certain that no strand of hair escaped the severe knot she tied each day at the back of her head. Or to make announcements to herself about the weather. Once or twice a day, if the circumstances warranted it, she would approach the oval above her dresser and deliver, as if a message of great importance, statements such as “The wind has stopped” or “It has rained for far too long.” Sometimes at twilight the white fenceposts at the bottom of the lane looked like a procession of ghosts approaching her gate.

  At night her body sometimes attempted to awaken distant memories, but her mind would have none of it. This was going to be her life, this routine of daily tasks and chores and prayers. Whether she was happy did not seem to be important. As for affection, it was given to her cats, and more recently to the four large dignified animals occupying the field nearest the house—the field she had kept for herself, and for them.

  Klara had seen her first white animal in a painting on the side of Kiefer Erb’s barn, where normally a portrait of a perfectly ordinary Holstein was displayed. Klara thought for a moment that someone in the night must have come along and painted out the cow’s dark spots. A few days later the words Erb and Son were added above it, and below it Klara read Home of the Wissemburg White. (The Erbs’ ancestors, she knew, had emigrated from the town of Wissemburg and so had decided to name the cow on the barn after the faraway Alsatian town they had never seen.)

  Klara was perturbed and fascinated by the painting and finally was compelled to confront Kiefer Erb one day in the store.

  “Is there such a thing?” she asked bluntly while the man was deep in thought near a variety of roofing nails.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The white cow you have on your barn, is it real?”

  Kiefer smiled, always happy to talk about his prize. “Oh, it’s real, all right, Miss Becker,” he raised an eyebrow and exchanged glances with the storekeeper, “but I’m surprised you didn’t notice. It’s not a cow, it’s a bull. A special bull—Charolais—from France. Best breeder in Ontario, I figure.” He paused, considered, then couldn’t resist, “Someone you want serviced?”

  This kind of humour was often employed at the expense of spinsters, who men assumed were starved for sex, but rarely, it’s true, were these jokes told in their presence.

  The shopkeeper smiled sheepishly and reddened. But Klara refused to be embarrassed. “Where did you get him?” she asked.

  “Quebec. Cost a fortune. But I figure he’ll earn his keep.”

  That summer Klara saw the bull glowing in his pasture each day when she walked to town, his colour creamier, warmer than in his portrait. Unlike others of his species he showed neither curiosity nor hostility when she gazed at him from her side of the fence. In fact the only thing he seemed to be interested in was the bell in the steeple of Father Gstir’s church. When it tolled, and particularly when it tolled for a long time at noon, the beast would raise his head in a regal fashion and there would be something in his manner that suggested a sorrow nobly borne. Klara imagined that he was homesick for Quebec, a place where, she had heard, there were numerous Catholic churches and therefore, it would follow, many wonderful bells. Most of the time, however, he appeared to be distant and preoccupied, as if he were trying to solve the puzzle of how he came to be standing in an Ontario pasture surrounded by unfamiliar spotted females.

  Klara adored him, loved even the soft sound of his name, Shar - oh - lay. Interesting to her too were the rumours, soon strong around town, that he had refused to mate. Even his portrait was proving to be ambivalent, the white paint beginning to peel after the second or third of August’s thunderstorms. In early September she noticed, passing by Erb’s farm, that the red paint covering the rest of the barn appeared to have erased Wissemburg’s penis and to have eliminated the words beneath the painted beast that identified his home. Several black spots had been added to his neutered snowy side. On the Erb mai
lbox there hung a humble sign advertising the fact that a bull was for sale.

  Klara was mad with joy, the word “Charolais” ringing like Father Gstir’s bell in her mind. Her grandfather had left her a small legacy, and she happily parted with over a quarter of it to buy the sturdy white animal. The rest of the money she sent to Quebec and soon Charolais’ loneliness was assuaged by the appearance in his new pasture and proximity in the winter barn of Charlotta, a fine, soft-eyed white Charolais cow.

  Charlotta calved in spring. Twins. In late winter of the following year a certain amount of incest took place and Klara sold the offspring for what she considered to be a handsome price, trying not to think too long or too hard about what would become of the “wee ones.” Kiefer Erb, jealous at her success, made suggestive remarks all over the village about Klara’s relationship with the white bull, but as no one had the nerve to repeat them in her presence, they had no effect whatsoever on the pride she felt at seeing the animals increase in number and at being able to care for them herself, doing the job as efficiently as any man.

  Despite this, in the evenings when she had stopped working in the barn or sewing a jacket for someone else’s husband, Klara could not get over a feeling of distance, a sense that she was not only separated from the community in which she lived but also that she was becoming oddly disassociated from the trappings of the only home she had ever known. Often she became vaguely irritated with one physical object or another, or mildly antagonistic toward a whole room. Those brass candlesticks, she would think, they just sit there and tarnish, or That parlour, what good has it ever contributed to the world? Each Sunday after mass she indulged herself by reading a newspaper, The Goderich Star Sentinel or, if she could get it, The London Free Press. The wealth of stories contained in these journals both stimulated and disoriented her, making her wish that something would happen in her own life, then making her fear that such a wish was capable of changing her current neutrality for discontent.

  Klara could manage the maintenance of only the first row of trees in what had been a substantial apple orchard when her father was actively running the farm. But, even so, the other trees—though twisted and wild and bearing only puny, worm-ridden apples—still blossomed splendidly along with their pruned and plucked cousins, adding a pleasing balance on one side of the house to the field of white cows, calves, and one bull who grazed on the other. In the autumn Klara faithfully harvested all of the apples from the four well-kept trees, giving some as treats to the animals and hauling the rest by a wagon attached to her very old horse to the cider mill near the brewery.

  It was a late afternoon in September of 1934, while she was perched dangerously close to the top of the pointed ladder with one hand grasping a perfectly round McIntosh apple, that Klara spotted a stranger with a pack on his back, limping slowly up the long lane that led to the house. Tramps had begged at her door before and she had always given them something. Today it would be apples and whatever other scraps of food she had lying about. She sighed, let go of the apple she was holding, and began to descend the ladder. But on the third step she stopped. There was something she had recognized in the shape of this man’s head and, even from this distance, in the placement of his ears and eyebrows. She stood entirely still and gazed at her hands, which were wrapped around the grey wood of the ladder, then unconsciously lifted one of them to smooth her hair, for the first time in over a decade becoming aware of what she had become, of how she would appear if the man in the lane turned out to be Eamon. He was making painfully slow progress, swinging his right leg stiffly forward before permitting the left to join it, but with each step the spark of recognition was fanned toward flame in Klara’s mind. She experienced terror then: pure, cold, and immobilizing. It took an unimaginable strength of will for her to climb again two rungs of the ladder in order to be concealed by the leaves of the tree, leaves that she noticed had begun to twitch in a sudden shift of wind.

  Klara stood on the ladder and tried to remember the appearance of the woman to whom she spoke each day in the mirror, but she could call up only an uncertain image of tidy hair. The man had entered the yard now and was lurching toward the back door. Without a fraction of hesitation he lifted the latch, hauled his bad leg over the threshold, and disappeared inside. Klara recalled evenings two decades past when Eamon had sat sullenly in the kitchen. If it were him, would he choose the same chair?

  Sometime later she came back to herself and found that she was standing perfectly still on a ladder, hiding in a tree, and she felt infantile, stupid. Her insteps ached and there was a sliver in her palm that had lodged there when she had slid her hands too quickly up the side of the ladder in her panic. Dusk was falling, and she was trembling slightly. The chill in the air was causing this, she decided, her old practicality returning. Klara thought about the man who had sauntered casually through her door as if he were a family pet. What could this possibly mean, this assumed right of passage? She quickly descended the ladder and began to march toward the house. Inside, the vaguely familiar stranger was sitting at the table eating bread and cheese.

  He was not Eamon.

  He was not Eamon. Grief rushed at Klara like an avalanche, as if someone had seized her from behind and had suddenly thrust her head into coldness and darkness. She was physically assaulted by it. There was no breath remaining in her body.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said the man, his eyes a mirror of her own. “Is it Klara?”

  Not taking her eyes off the stranger she sat down slowly, unable at the moment to answer even the most simple question about her identity. Her self had slipped out of her body and was floating somewhere above the long grass she could see from her window. Black-and-white images of the carnage of the war from her father’s newspapers were passing swiftly through her mind, as if she had been a country senselessly invaded—passing through her mind though she had no memory at all of ever looking at these pictures. She stood up and then sat down again, became aware of the stranger’s face looking at her with concern and slowly, like oxygen returning to the bloodstream of one who has almost been strangled, she began to re-inhabit the room. But she knew she would never recover. This man was not Eamon. Eamon was dead.

  The man had crossed the room now and had put his hand on her arm, was bending toward her and looking with confusion into her face. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said. And then again, “You are Klara, aren’t you?” He was so close to her she could feel his warm breath and smell his sweat.

  Klara did not answer.

  “Oh God,” said the man, turning his face away, “how could I have expected anyone to know me. I’m Tilman. I lived here as a child. Is it still the Becker place?”

  Klara stared at him, a look of such profound shock on her face it was as if the man had slapped her. She stood up suddenly, took his shoulders in her hands, and pushed him roughly back, causing him to stagger awkwardly against the old pine table.

  Then Klara flew at her brother with her fists.

  Tilman stood still and received the blows. She attacked his arms and chest. He stopped her only when she began to kick, fearing she might injure herself when her foot met his wooden leg.

  That evening, while an exhausted Klara soaked her bruised hands in a bowl of cool water, the brother and sister sat at the table and talked. Tilman explained little about where he had been before or after, but he did talk about the war, making reference to his artificial leg and telling her about the great battle in which he had participated until he was wounded out.

  It was being fought on all levels, he told her, under the ground, on the surface, and in the air. It was the craziest thing, he said, pure bedlam. And the casualties were huge, overwhelming, though in the end the Canadians had taken the ridge. Afterwards hardly anyone who had participated and survived could remember anything about it, except chaos.

  “Which battle was it?” Klara wanted to know.

  “Vimy,” said her brother. “Vimy Ridge.”

  When Tilman returned from the
war without his right leg, news had preceded him concerning his ability to work with wood. His sergeant, secretly impressed by the small, flat scenes the young man had worked on in the boggy trenches, had noted his talent on some form or another and this piece of paper had made its sluggish way through the network of military bureaucracy. After Vimy—the days and nights in the underground tunnels, the chaos of the battle, the grenade, the shattered leg and subsequent hurried and sloppy amputation—he had asked in the hospital, when he was finally able to talk, for limewood and a knife. “Quite a whittler!” a doctor had scribbled on an otherwise purely medical report, and that too had wended its way toward the governmental department that was being hastily assembled in the nation’s capital to deal with permanently damaged soldiers.

  Thousands of wounded veterans were returning, many missing limbs. The government was in a state of mild panic. Various opinions were offered about what was to be done with these mutilated young men, the most common being that they should not be permitted to sink into shiftlessness, sloth, and self-pity. Eventually an otherwise dull and unpromising civil servant made a name for himself by suggesting that as most of the boys were still on crutches with one hollow pant leg blowing in the breeze, some of them at least might be gainfully employed making wooden legs for themselves and others like themselves in a factory designed for this purpose. A building that had been used until very recently in the manufacturing of wooden porch pillars, and was therefore splendidly outfitted with saws and lathes, was discovered in Toronto, inspected, thought to be just the ticket, and rapidly purchased by the department. It was much too large for the operation the government had in mind, but that problem was quickly solved by the same civil servant, who suggested the handicapped workers could be housed in dormitories above their place of employment. (No one had thought about how these young men were to get up and down the stairs, but that was a problem for another day.) When Tilman’s case came up, the two references to carving were met with great approval by the committee that had been formed to compile a list of suitable candidates. Tilman’s name went to the top of this list.