The Stone Carvers Page 4

  While he sat in silence, evening after evening in the large farm kitchen, Klara performed her domestic duties noisily, banging stove lids, rattling dishes in the pan, slamming the bottom drawers of the hutch cupboard. The kitchen was hers, really, had been so since she had turned fifteen, since her mother had died. She believed she resented this foreign intrusion into what she had marked out as her own territory. Until this moment there had been just her father and herself, night after night, their habits and conversation a hymn to predictability.

  The grandparents walked over from their own farm sometimes for a Sunday meal. Once or twice a year the new Irish priest visited, and some of the Sisters had come for tea. But there had been no raw energy in these rooms since her brother disappeared in their childhood. And she had become comfortable with being the sole custodian of youth in the house.

  The weeks passed and Klara was no better able to explain the suffocating tension that seemed to enter with Eamon through the door, how his presence made the clocks tick louder and louder in a silence that grew like a lengthening shadow. Her father read the paper or a book near the stove and sporadically announced a surprising bit of news he had discovered in his reading or a change of farming practice he had heard about in town. The boy answered monosyllabically. The rustle of the paper, the creak of the Boston rocker set Klara’s teeth on edge.

  She was nineteen years old then. Until the accident of her uneasy and inexplicable connection with this boy, she had been happily spending her days engaged in the two professions she inherited from her mother—housekeeping and tailoring—and the one pastime she had learned from her grandfather—woodcarving. The first two activities gave her full run of the house; her sewing and cutting taking place in the sunroom over the porch, and most of her domestic duties, save the weekly dusting and waxing of the parlour, occupying the large kitchen. The moments of solitude with scissors, needle, chisel knife, or ladle—all much-loved tools—and the easy companionship her work led to—fittings and fashion consultations, shopping, and meals—were cherished by her. Each occupation fed the other, making her life, ironically for a tailor, seamless. Her handling of household objects gave her a greater knowledge of the shape and weight of things, and her measuring and fitting gave her much information about the structure of human anatomy, information she could in turn put to use when carving wooden saints. And the saints, themselves, she believed, bestowed grace on all the work she undertook to perform.

  She made the saints in a small wooden building that had once been the farm’s blacksmith shop. The old oven served well now to warm the air in the winter and to heat up the pots of horse-hoof glue Klara sometimes used to fasten the arms on her attempts at larger figures. Even with the door closed, the one south-facing window allowed her enough light to see what she was doing. The building’s small size and its separation from the house gave the whole exercise the atmosphere of play; carving was the reward that she permitted herself when her other chores were completed. Pure pleasure came to her then as the fashioning of her wooden people was connected to neither the necessities of survival nor the need to bring cash into the household.

  When she was a child, her grandfather had taught her how to whittle a small piece of wood, though it was really her brother, Tilman, that the old man had his eye on. He had hoped the boy would develop enough skill to at least make repairs to the church altars, if not fully embrace the profession of woodcarving, but Tilman’s attention span proved to be short when he was indoors, while Klara howled and stomped in the workshop until her grandfather reluctantly handed her some wood and a knife and showed her how to cut away from her body so she would not harm herself.

  In the beginning, Klara made toy animals: horses, pigs, and cows. Then she began to create more exotic species, beasts she had never seen except on advertising cards: leopards, giraffes with exaggerated necks and spots, or rhinos with horns. Dolls were a logical next step, and since her mother was teaching her how to sew, she made elaborate wardrobes for them from scraps she gleaned from the sunroom floor. She had a tendency to hoard her work at this early stage. Once, however, she made a complete Noah’s ark for her brother at Christmas, but because he had vanished by then, he never came into his old room to play with it. It remained at the back of the closet where she had placed it, untouched, practically unglimpsed, except by Klara herself, who checked now and then to see if he might have returned unnoticed to play with it in the night. Finally, when she was almost thirteen, filled with an indignation she didn’t even attempt to interpret, she took the dusty animals and their houseboat to the kitchen stove and dropped them into the fire, two by two.

  The saints began to emerge when Klara entered adolescence and had been confirmed at the church. Then shortly after her mother’s death she conceived the notion of making a life-sized statue of a medieval abbess—perhaps a saint—with a generously pleated habit. She would use what she had learned about cloth from her mother’s and, to a lesser extent, her own tailoring. Her grandfather would teach her what he knew about carving drapery. Her father would provide the wood for her when he cut log lengths for the next season’s fuel and brought them by sledge to the yard in midwinter.

  Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Klara experienced contentment as she never would again—though, because she had not at the time known the restlessness of desire, she would come to acknowledge this contentment only in retrospect. Now when she sat cross-legged on the table in the sunroom cutting cloth, or when the chisel she held bit into the wood, there was a splendid animal unconsciousness about her, a fulsome sense of well-being. It never occurred to her to change her life. She was young, reasonably skilled, and in confident control of her surroundings. But when Eamon broke into her world, insisting by his stance and his silence that she make a space for him there, some part of her considered this an act of vandalism. She would never fully forgive the way he trespassed into her tranquillity, just as later she would never forgive his determined act of truancy.

  The days lengthened, the snow began to melt, disclosing rough patches of the dark earth that had been ploughed the previous autumn after the harvest, and still each evening “Silent Irish” climbed the hill toward Klara’s kitchen.

  By now Klara was in a blistering, tight-lipped rage whenever he was in her presence, and much of the time that he wasn’t.

  “He’s courting you,” her quiet, sombre father told her with an uncharacteristic wink.

  “I’m not interested in being courted by the likes of him,” Klara snapped, her face filling with colour. “I’m not interested in being courted.”

  Dieter Becker shrugged his shoulders as if it mattered to him not at all. But the next clear, bright evening, after Eamon’s arrival, even before the boy had seated himself in his customary place, the older man excused himself and walked out to the barn.

  Klara had her back to the door, was lowering a tall stack of plates into the warm suds of the dishpan when she felt the whole atmosphere change by the fact they were alone together. She stared hard at the two skimpy lilac bushes she had planted last fall in the yard. Knowing she was never going to be able to turn around, she could feel Eamon’s gaze touch her like a warm hand between her shoulder blades. There was no sound at all until finally she heard his footsteps on the floor, and then the sound a chair makes when a body is settling into it.

  If she could manage to turn around, she decided, if she could just manage to do that, then she would be able to see things as they were, everything in place in her kitchen: a mat by the door, a damp tea towel thrown over a chair, all the reassuring furniture of her life undisturbed by his presence in her world. The thin branches of the lilac were bending to the left in a sudden evening breeze. The low sun, fiercely brilliant in the centre of the windowpane, was making her eyes fill with water. It was becoming almost impossible to continue to scrutinize the yard.

  She turned finally, her hands glistening, drops of water clinging to the ends of her fingers. The room was dark in contrast to the brightness beyond
the glass. Eamon was merely a featureless shape on a chair near the stove. Klara’s intention was to cross the room and leave by the woodshed door, leave him alone in the kitchen with his silence and his stubbornness, but she paused for a moment while her eyes adjusted to the shadows in the twilit room. After she had taken two or three steps, Eamon leaned forward and grasped her damp wrist.

  This one simple touch freed the storm of speech that had been building in her mind for weeks, setting in motion a savage interrogation. She hurled the words—almost hysterically—into the air. “What do you want? What right do you have, what … what are you doing here, and why don’t you speak? What makes you think anyone wants you to come here?”

  He was still holding on to her wrist. He said nothing.

  Klara looked at his hand, the large-knuckled awkwardness of it on her slender arm. She made a sharp movement as if to pull away. Then she clenched her fist and jerked her arm in the direction of his chest so now it was as if he were holding her at bay. “Why do you never speak?” she pleaded. “Say something!”

  They remained locked like this, obdurate, combatant, for several moments until Eamon flushed and tossed Klara’s arm back toward her body as if it were a broken branch he were removing from his path. Then he was out of the chair.

  “And what is it you would have me say?” he asked, his voice half broken by anger and sorrow. “What can I possibly say to you?” He swung toward the door she had been planning to exit from, stopped as if he might have added one more word to his own question, then strode through the woodshed and out across the damp snow in the yard, his head down, his hands thrust into his pockets.

  The shaft of setting sun that had so troubled Klara’s eyes was now on the chair where Eamon had been sitting. He had forgotten his jacket. Klara’s arm remained near her stomach, where it had come to rest after Eamon released it. It looked like a foreign object to her, something that was not now and had never been connected to her body. She watched with some interest as colour gradually returned to the white marks his fingers had left on her skin.

  The next night he didn’t walk up the hill at all.

  And she waited for him.

  “Where’s old Silent got to, I wonder?” asked her father, looking up at her over the tops of the glasses he wore to read in the evening.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Klara replied. “But it’s good to have our house back to ourselves, I’d say.”

  “He was no trouble sitting quietly in the kitchen.” Dieter looked at his daughter with fondness, amused by her petulance. “I’d say it’s a good change to have a young man come into the house.”

  Klara didn’t answer. She had been looking through the glass panel at the top of the door that led to the side porch, and had been distracted by the appearance of a figure far down the road. But whoever it was had gone off on the path that led to the village before she could accurately determine whether it was Eamon.

  Some of Klara’s temperament had been inherited from her grandfather. Whenever she looked at his serene face she could never believe that he had once been moved by any kind of passion. And yet he told her that as a young man in Bavaria he had been thought pious because he was known to break down and weep in front of altarpieces, and in the presence of statues of the Madonna or the saints. But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit that had touched him; he was a worshipper of graven images, a lover of wooden skin. Sometimes, particularly when he was locked in a visual trance in front of a piece by the great sixteenth-century carver Tilman Riemenschneider, his tears would be those of joy and frustration. He would adore the figure itself, the long thighs, the branching streams of veins on the inner arms, but he would be driven almost to despair by the knowledge that he would never be able to cause such vitality to enter wood.

  By the time Father Archangel Gstir came into his life, Joseph Becker was a craftsman of great skill—the priest thought him wonderfully gifted—but he himself was aware of his own limitations, and often when he was alone with the work he was doing for the procession, he would feel the tears begin to sting his eyes. For several agonizing minutes he would curse the God who had given him just enough of the gift to understand what he lacked, the same God that had permitted him to be carving at the outer reaches of the world among people who would be able to comprehend neither his ability nor his limitations. He would be forever a perfectionist incapable of achieving the quality of perfection he worshipped in the great master’s work. And his granddaughter had inherited from him a need for order, a sort of corollary of perfection.

  Klara had also inherited a tendency toward the kind of anger she had seen increase daily in her mother after Tilman’s disappearance, and had incorporated into her own personality, as well as into her work, the sense of superiority with which her mother rode through the unworthy world that had taken her son away.

  Helga Becker had always insisted that the service she performed was tailoring, and that it was as different from dressmaking as medieval tapestry-making was to pillow-slip embroidery. “Any fool can be a dressmaker,” she had told Klara. “Anyone capable of looking in a woman’s magazine and stitching two hunks of cloth together.” But tailoring, she had maintained, required talent, skill, and patience. “And you are not just covering something up,” she had said. “You are constructing something with shape and weight and volume. A garment that is tailored. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I can’t be a tailor. And don’t call me a seamstress either. Anyone who can hold a needle can be a seamstress.”

  As an orphaned girl, Helga had been trained by the woman who would eventually become her mother-in-law, and she had strongly objected to the older woman’s modesty. “Imagine,” she would say to Klara, “your grandmother calling herself a seamstress right up until the day she died, when she could plan and cut and sew circles around those men in Goderich calling themselves tailors. And she did so much for the church. In my opinion, in his old age, Father Gstir was better dressed than the Pope.”

  Klara’s mother had made good coats and jackets for almost everyone in the village, and travelling suits for the women, though hardly anyone took the journeys these outfits were designed for. She drew the line at men’s trousers, for decency’s sake, but reasoned that this was no great loss as men were apt to buy the readymades down at Hafeman’s store. “They’d buy their suit jackets there too,” she had confided, “if they didn’t have to face me looking at them in such sad get-ups. Me, who can make a fine figure out of the sorriest of them with my tailored waistcoats. I’ve been the making of most of the men in this village,” she asserted, “and a great number of the women as well.”

  It was true that the citizens of Shoneval were as well attired a congregation as entered a Catholic church anywhere in Ontario, especially in comparison to the collection of ragged folk that had shivered inside the first log church constructed in Father Gstir’s day, folk who had neither the time nor the money to think about whether they wanted or needed waistcoats and travelling suits. Now it was a fine sight indeed to see such well-appointed people climb the hill to mass, then descend that same hill again to make the traditional Sunday visit to Der Archangel. In the early days the good Father had led his little flock down to the brewery for the customary tankard after mass. When the tavern was completed shortly after the consecration of the large stone church in 1881, Father Gstir had been greatly moved when the innkeeper elected to name the new establishment after his confessor.

  Klara, skilled with a needle from childhood and a marvel with scissors from her adolescence on, had taken over her mother’s business at sixteen, after Helga had been dead for about half a year. At first the men were shy of her, this young girl with the shining golden hair, but gradually they had relaxed in the face of her businesslike, formal, almost superior manner.

  “Men are the most vain creatures on God’s earth,” her mother had told Klara, “even farmers. They claim they don’t like to dress for Sundays, but they’re just like peacocks once you get a coat on them. Add a piece of silk braid
to the coat and there’s no living with them.”

  “And remember this,” she had added, “all men like to believe they have fine figures … even though next to none of them have. Tailors … good tailors cause magical transformations to take place. A good suit jacket creates an enviable illusion so a fine tailor is indispensable—mostly because of male vanity. Those farmers could no more create this illusion themselves than they could make palm trees flourish in their winter fields. You, therefore, will be indispensable.”

  Indispensable or not, Klara gave two hours of each day to sewing in the winter and sometimes up to four hours in the summer when the light lasted well into the evening and she was able to work after supper. She had, as a result, a good collection of “show” garments, the ability to complete projects well and on time, and a much cherished bank account of her own. None of the other young women she knew, with the exception of two or three nuns, were as independent as she was, and the knowledge of this contributed greatly to her as yet unrecognized contentment.

  Eamon didn’t walk up to the farm the next night either. Or the night after that. Or in the weeks that followed. Thankfully, with the lengthening days, her father became too busy in the fields after supper to ask about the boy. And Klara herself had her sewing to attend to. But now it was as if she were always waiting for something or, worse, as if she were searching for something she could barely remember. All those who were gone from her life haunted her, but imprecisely, never really materializing into brother, or mother, or lost friend. It was as if, against her will, her mind had decided to develop a philosophy of absenteeism, so that the tree felled in the yard five years ago or the broken platter she had tossed into the farm dump last summer now suddenly became grave losses, though she could not call to mind a branch or stem or leaf or the specifics of a china pattern. She stormed through the house for days looking for a pair of kid gloves that had belonged to her mother, finding them at last in the attic, dried and yellowed by the heat of several summers.