The Stone Carvers Read online

  As he tramped wearily over the frost-covered mud, leading the horse that had developed a fear of the ice in the many potholes, Father Gstir fretted over the details. He knew that Joseph would successfully complete the large crucifix and the statue of the Virgin that would be carried in the procession, so his mind was at ease in relation to this. But someone in the procession was going to have to be splendidly robed, and that someone was himself. After making several inquiries along his route, a woman surrounded by whining children told him that the twenty-year-old daughter of a settler near the village had worked as a seamstress in a tailor’s shop in one of the southern towns. Interestingly, like Joseph Becker, she too had brought her most cherished tools with her to the wilderness, in her case scissors and embroidery needles. (The spinster always experienced a slight thrill of recognition at this point in the story, for the handsome young woman who agreed to embroider Father Gstir’s spare vestments, and who promised to contact her old employer about the donation of heavy red cloth, was her grandmother. “It was a Corpus Christi procession in the backwoods,” Joseph Becker would tell his granddaughter, “that brought together the chisel and the needle.”)

  How young they were then, the carver and the seamstress and the priest, all dead by the 1930s, by the time Klara and her friends in the convent would recall and cherish the story. Younger than the spinster, and younger too than any of the nuns. But the backwoods was no place for even the middle-aged, as everyone was necessarily engaged in the act of turning one thing into another, an occupation that required an athletic form of labour, a labour that never ceased. The carver transformed barley into flour and wood into statues; the seamstress made bedsheets into altar cloths; the men in the sawmill helped turn forests into wastelands, while the farmers attempted to turn wastelands into fields. The priest was hoping to turn a barren hilltop into the site of a pilgrimage church whose bell would ring out to an established village and whose song would carry over beautifully cultivated fields. All of them were trying to force western culture into a place where it undoubtedly had no business to be. It was hard work.

  As the winter progressed, more and more wooden European ships—ships that brought a few sacks of mail and cargoes of human beings in a westerly direction and a few sacks of mail and cargoes of lumber in an easterly direction—were tossed on unfriendly seas. It wasn’t until March that Father Gstir finally received an answer from the Central Direction of the Ludwig Missions-Verig at Munich. The gentlemen, who had been delighted by the Bavarian priest’s portrayal of life in the wilds, were full of questions regarding hunting and taxidermy. No mention was made of the church or the bell, but there was mention of their benefactor, Ludwig of Bavaria, who “had great interests in the wild beasts of the northern hemisphere” and who, having read Pater Archangel’s letter, was now requesting that the “good arctic priest” trap three or four polar bears of highest quality and snowy whiteness to be shipped to His Majesty’s property, where they would be tamed and then permitted to roam at their leisure through the Sauling; the mountains and the distant plain.

  Father Gstir was not deterred. He had made contact with the monarch, the great king of architectural endeavour, the patron of difficult projects in preposterous locations. Surely His Majesty’s desire for polar bears would diminish when he thought about the magnificent stone church Pater Archangel planned for the wilderness. Was not Neuschwanstein being designed for an inaccessible stone pinnacle in mountainous Bavarian wilds near Pollat Falls? And were there not plans for a vast hunting lodge in another improbable spot? Father Gstir determined that in his next letter he would suggest—with great respect and humility—that, unlike the German treasury department, God the Father would smile on all of Ludwig’s architectural creations were the king to make a contribution toward a church for Bavaria’s exiled sons and daughters, as well as, he added, a bell for said church.

  The reference to the polar bears had given him a number of ideas for the Corpus Christi procession, now only three months away. “An inventory must be made,” he told Joseph, “of all the animals in our surroundings.”

  He had entered the carver’s workshop just as Joseph was to begin work on the Virgin Mary—now with the approach of spring there was again some light before and after his shift at the mill. The large crucifix was completed and leaned against the wall. Joseph had not decided whether he would paint it and if so where he was to get gold leaf for the nimbus.

  “All of the domestic animals, I mean,” the priest continued. “Horses, pigs, cows, and a donkey. We must have a donkey for the procession. Christ entered Jerusalem on a donkey. Do you know where we can find one, Joseph?”

  “I do not,” replied Joseph, running one long finger across his jawline while staring at the block of wood from which the Holy Mother would emerge. “Shall I colour my statues?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Father Gstir, “it will do the people good to see colour. And what are we to do about music?”

  Joseph said that the Irishman responsible for the township’s Celtic name played a sort of violin in a rather frenetic way. “It sounds somewhat like Bach,” he said, “but played much too quickly.” He took off his hat and shook wood shavings from the brim.

  “And are there singers?”

  Joseph recalled certain drunken evenings in the bunkhouse. “Sometimes the men sing,” he reported tentatively. The songs they knew were quite inappropriate but might be modified. “One of the men has an accordion.”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Father Gstir. “And what is the Irishman’s name?”

  “O’Sullivan … Brendan. A farmer and a carpenter.”

  The mention of carpentry brought Father Gstir’s imagined place of worship back to his busy mind. He described his plan to interest King Ludwig in the church. But Joseph was skeptical. “He will never see it, this church,” said the carver. “He will not be interested because he will not know what it looks like.”

  “O indeed he will,” maintained the priest. “Indeed he will see the church, for you will carve a small model for the procession, and then we will send it to Munich.” He smiled benevolently. “You may leave it unpainted. And before we send it,” he added, “the church will be carried at the head of the procession by the children who will eventually worship in it.”

  “I have only three months!” Joseph threw his hands up in exasperation. “How can I work in the mill every day and then do all this carving for you?” He had no idea he was describing the division of labour that would determine the rest of his life, that he would always be employed at least half of the time to ensure survival while never—even for a day—letting his hand stray far from a chisel.

  “You are not carving for me,” replied Father Gstir. “You are carving for God.”

  The spinster was a woman called Klara, named at her grandfather’s suggestion after the saint who attached herself to Francis. But as a mature woman in the early 1930s, Klara was not averse to being called “the spinster.” She liked the sound of the word, the way it flung itself out of one’s mouth and thrust itself, bristling, into the day. She was eccentric, as spinsters are meant to be, but she was forgiven this by the nuns and most of the village because of some unhappy events in her early life. When she burst into meetings of the village council, demanding a war memorial, the esteemed councillors soberly waited out the storm, then, after the door had banged shut behind her, remarked on her early sorrows. They talked about how she lived all alone, up there at Becker’s Corners on the farm behind the church with only the odd hired boy to help her with her livestock, or the storing of winter firewood, or the requirement that four or five pails of water be hauled each day from the pump to the summer kitchen. Their assumption that she was “geist-ridden”—old enough at almost forty to be surrounded by ghosts—was true enough, but what the men didn’t know was that this affliction gave Klara enough spiritual company to make her life quite full. And as for keeping herself busy, the spinster had tailored the splendid jackets of everyone in town.

  Klara
had her memories, a cemetery full of dead family members, a village from which most of her schoolmates had fled, a brother who had vanished, an ancient religion replete with narrative, the knowledge of the village’s mythology, two difficult skills learned from two masters (her mother and her grandfather), friends in the convent, and a solid sense of how to keep her mind intact, despite the constant loneliness. She had also the possession of something that only a very few spinsters have: independence and a past.

  She was aware that most unmarried women in her village, and in the villages surrounding hers, had always lived auxiliary lives. Called in to look after the household when one of their more fortunate sisters gave birth to a child or hovering by the side of the sickbeds and deathbeds of elderly relatives, a spinster’s career was often one of service to those whom nature had dealt with more fairly. They had no particular past because no man had felt moved to consider them, for whatever reason, as an object of romance or, failing that, as a useful object of domestic labour in married life. But Klara served no master; she alone determined the tasks she would perform each day. And when she was quite young, romance had disturbed and illuminated her life, had cast its light and its shadow over her for one intense, confusing season.

  She did her best not to dwell on this any longer, feeling that to remain absorbed by a personal past of a romantic nature was unbecoming to a woman of her age. Better to be outdoors herding her white cows or harvesting apples, or indoors tailoring a suit jacket, washing windows, sweeping up. Or at the church polishing pews, or in the cemetery tending the plants around the family plot.

  In her twenties it had been a fierce, unspoken sorrow, this past, catching her off guard during the day, causing her to dig her nails into the flesh of her palms, or taking her quite unexpectedly back to scenes so tender she could be locked in them for long periods of time, could find herself standing quite still, completely absent from the task that had been occupying her hands. This frightened and appalled her—so much so that she began to train herself in the art of stoic apartness, a separation from her former self. She had been a good pupil in this endeavour and began finally to behave normally as a spinster, keeping the past at a distance, on the other side of the fence, of her skin.

  Only once in recent years had she given in to it, and this had caused her to do something quite odd on a moist summer day, one that was uncharacteristically misty for the season. All week, inexplicably, she had permitted scenes from the past to buzz around in her head until, by the time Saturday arrived, she began to believe that, like the fog that was everywhere except indoors, she was not really inside the house of her mind. Or perhaps it was that unlike the fog she was in that house and nowhere else. She decided then to let the outside atmosphere into her rooms, and she opened every window, every door, and watched the white, odourless smoke crawl over threshold and sill, curl around the legs of chairs, and spread itself over tables and beds. She unlatched cupboard and closet doors and pulled open drawers in various dressers so that the fog touched even her most intimate underclothes and crept around her dead mother’s good dishes. When the whole house had turned opaque, she realized suddenly that her actions had gone well beyond the bounds of eccentricity permitted a spinster. She slammed shut windows, doors, drawers and cupboards, and washed her face with cold water—for she now found that she had been weeping—and promised herself nothing of this nature would ever happen again. There would be no more unpremeditated dives into personal memory. She knew this was nonsense, of course, that there was nothing at all one can do about something one can’t forget. The more it is pushed away, the more it stays stubbornly planted in the rich soil of a life’s narrative. Dormant, perhaps, but ready with the smallest provocation to burst into full flower.

  Despite a total change in the weather, the dampness in Klara’s empty house had lasted for several days.

  The house, which was Klara’s childhood home, had not always been empty. Once, there had been a father and a mother. Once there had been a brother. Each had left a trace of himself or herself in one room or another: a pipe, a set of suspenders, a jewellery box, a hand mirror, a small pair of good Sunday boots. And each had left something unresolved in Klara, words spoken, or not spoken, or words spoken in anger. Each had left an empty chair at the table.

  It had taken her mother, Helga Becker, five years to die. When the actual physical sickness set in during the last six months of her mother’s life, Klara realized she had known since the age of ten that some dark thing was growing slowly larger inside the woman who had given birth to her. When at fifteen she was told about the cancer and how it would soon kill her mother, it seemed to Klara that, like the dimension of her brother’s absence that expanded at the close of each new day, this tumour had been gradually filling her mother’s skull, slowly pushing the light and the life out of their house.

  After Klara’s brother had been gone for a full year, and her mother’s fits of weeping and formidable tantrums had ceased, a new, clipped practicality appeared to enter her. She seemed then to be perpetually angered by the superficiality of a world that could continue on with its business in the face of the total dematerialization of her son. It was during this time that she began to teach Klara the art of tailoring, but without tenderness, as if she felt that her young daughter were part of this conspiracy of ordinariness and ought to be provided with some business to get on with. This phase was followed by greater and greater withdrawal, punctuated by terse statements suggesting that her husband, Dieter, was to blame for the boy’s disappearance and therefore, by association, responsible for her own unhappiness, though she never spoke of Tilman except when making these allegations. When the subtle accusations were overheard by Klara, they terrified her, for though she had never said so, she felt that the real culprit was herself, that any blame ought to be aimed at her. In the end, though she left school and nursed her faithfully until the instant of her death, Klara no longer loved her mother but was able to muster no argument against her that did not circle back to her own actions.

  But it was neither this nor the grief that accompanied it that Klara had been remembering the day she let the mist into the house.

  When the land around Shoneval was cleared of trees and stumps and boulders by loggers and mill workers and farmers in the middle of the nineteenth century, several things began to happen. The stumps were used for fences, some of which, though not many, could still be seen in the vicinity of Klara’s farm. The boulders were gathered to make the foundations of houses and barns and various other buildings, and endured as memorials to the frame structures that once surmounted them. The trees, of course, if not used for building, made the journey to the sawmill, where they were subjected to the mutilation process that had so disturbed Joseph Becker. Excess rainfall, which was once thirstily consumed by the great forests, now had nowhere to go except downhill to collect in the depressions among gentle hills. Over time the lingering moisture produced new swampy areas where, in the beginning, willow trees flourished until they were killed by an overabundance of the liquid that had originally encouraged their growth.

  It was the swamp nearest the farm that Klara had been recalling, the swamp frozen over in winter, its dead willows sparkling with frost. A scene not unlike one of those unfurled at a travelling medicine show. A scene not unlike those she had heard were painted on the walls of the Swan Room in one of King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. A scene filled with stillness and the anticipation of dance.

  Had she allowed it, Klara’s mind could still paint it, shining branch by shining branch: the dark perfect ice under a sky of eye-watering clarity, the young man and the young woman skating there. They had not moved together as partners but had made a game of it, skating the way young children skate in a kind of indiscriminate, inconclusive chase, for they were not many years removed from childhood and it was childhood’s echo that moved with them across the ice.

  It had been late in the afternoon. Balanced on a hill behind them, the setting sun appeared to be tangled in the twis
ted forms of a stump fence, its rays colouring the steam of their breath a soft orange. Though they had known each other most of their lives, they were suddenly uncomfortable with each other and confused by the impulse that had sent them off to skate in this strange place, alone, while the other young villagers were filling the pond with laughter. Klara had turned suddenly and they had crashed together, had fallen, as if killed in combat. Then they had lain quite still on the ice, mysterious, and knowing something neither could speak about.

  Klara remembered the warmth of his neck in the cold, his skin on the inch of her bare wrist between her mitten and her coat sleeve. His face had undergone a change, his expression becoming serious, the dark eyebrows gathered together as if he were puzzled or annoyed. In retrospect she believed that her face would have changed as well though she couldn’t have known that at the time.

  After that afternoon he would tramp up to the farm in the evenings and sit on a chair in the kitchen, his legs apart, his arms resting on his knees, his eyes on the floor between his feet. “Silent Irish,” her father called him though they knew his name was Eamon, for the young man came from one of the very first Irish families who had been drawn by their faith to the Catholic settlement that was developing around Shoneval. Eamon didn’t speak at all for the first few months, and Klara herself said very little. But she wanted talk, some sort of declaration or interpretation, an explanation perhaps for the waves of dread that accompanied her attraction to him, for the subtle anger his coming to the farm each evening seemed to cause in him, and in her, for the way he appeared to endure the hours near her as if they were punishment.

  At night she would kneel by her bed and pray that he would speak to her. “One word,” she would whisper, “one sentence.” She had never in her short life been this perplexed by anyone. And she had never confessed him. What would there have been to say? “We fell together on the ice, Father, and have been angry with each other ever since.” There was no sin in that, except the anger, and therefore no resolution beyond the suggestion that one or the other should apologize, but for what Klara did not know.