The Stone Carvers Page 5

  I have not paid enough attention, she thought, looking at the two wrinkled pieces of leather that were so disturbingly like the human hands they were meant to cover. When she picked them up, the leather fingers curled softly over her own, as if someone were attempting to press her hand. The palms and the ends of the thumbs, she noticed, were slightly soiled.

  Klara stood alone in the dim light of the attic, her serious face partially lit by one low window. “I have never,” she whispered, closing her fist around the gloves, “I have never paid enough attention.”

  Sometimes, during the howling winter nights of the first year Father Gstir spent near the gristmill and the sawmill that would eventually become the centre of Shoneval, he would surprise himself by becoming discouraged. He had never seen such weather, was not precisely certain that the performance of the elements was natural even in this northern place where no Christian had chosen to live before. Drifts climbed up the outside walls of his cabin and pushed their way under his wooden door. Snow swirled around the glass of his one window until it became completely covered with a thick rind of frost that could only be chipped off with a knife. His bible was glued by ice to the table, the table was glued by ice to the floor. Washing—either his clothing or himself—was unthinkable and, although the idea of sweat was unimaginable, he was not unaware of his own body odour and that of Joseph’s when he was visiting, an odour that he decided was somehow even more rancid in cold air than it would have been in warm.

  When he was alone on these nights he consoled himself by thinking of his royal benefactor’s castles. Though he knew very little about them, he imagined their architecture, their absurd constructions, their rooms of fuchsia and turquoise, the music in them, the pageantry. He saw them rise—against all odds—on the pinnacles of such extraordinary mountains that, in his more rational moments, he suspected did not exist—not in Bavaria, not anywhere. He knew that Ludwig’s preposterous stone bouquets of towers and arches were in no way connected to God, that they celebrated almost all of the deadly sins, but still he loved them harder for their insistence on the secular.

  As he sat practically embracing the iron stove from which little heat seemed to emanate despite its insatiable hunger for logs, one castle after another would swell and fade in his head, the way the sound of a great bell expands, holds volume and tone for a glorious moment, and then recedes like someone walking toward and then away from you. Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, the huge follies built first in the king’s mind by his love of German mythology and by his imagination and later constructed on mountaintops by his peasants and his will. Before Father Gstir left Bavaria he had heard only rumours of plans for these palaces; they could not possibly have been completed in the intervening time. And yet here they were, fully embellished, draped, and painted in the mind of a cold priest huddled in the heart of a Canadian forest.

  He talked about the castles with Joseph one night in February, both of them sitting side by side on a rough wooden bench with their boots on the fender of the stove. “What would your thoughts be on a great work of architecture perched so high no road could reach it?”

  Joseph, more practical, pointed out that such a work of architecture could not be constructed without a road to bring in men and materials. His long hands appeared to be shaping the road, carving the men and the materials as he spoke.

  “Perhaps the road … this impossible road … might be sealed up afterwards,” Father Gstir ventured, “so that one could do nothing more than gaze at this marvel from a distance.”

  “But King Ludwig would want to live at least some of the time in his castles.” Joseph sniffed the smell of scorched leather in the air, then removed his boots from the heat source. Each night the men moved their feet back and forth in the vicinity of the fender, having to choose between numb toes or burnt footwear.

  “Yes,” said the priest, placing his own boots on the floor, “he will live in them and there will be roads for him to come and go, and for supplies to be carried in. Chocolate. His Majesty has a terrible fondness for chocolate, which would, of course, be brought from somewhere else.” Father Gstir paused, bent forward to examine the sole of one boot, then added sadly, “We have no chocolate here, which is a shame. No chocolate at all, Joseph.”

  “No chocolate at all,” Joseph agreed.

  “What I have in my mind, though,” Father Gstir put another log in the roaring stove, “is a work of architecture that has no function, a chambered sculpture, if you like. One left entirely alone after it is built. One that perches on its mountain and lets the elements play with it, lets sun and shadow and nothing else into its rooms. The odd mouse, I suppose, might visit. Or birds, once the windows begin to break.”

  “No repairs?”

  “No repairs. As one standing in the valley looking up year after year, I should like to see how this construction decays, how long it takes before it becomes a ruin. What would go first, do you think? The windows, of course, blown out of their casements by mountain winds. And then quite possibly the doors. After the roof goes, then there is no hope. Rain, snow begins to eat the plaster, the beams. After that it becomes a ruin, and there is no turning back. It is the same with almost anything that remains abandoned. Friends, sweethearts, places, homelands, houses, and this castle in my mind. After a certain period of time the roof goes and there is no turning back. Still it is important to see what kind of a ruin remains, for it is my contention that only the greatest works make beautiful ruins.”

  “Perhaps you are right.” Joseph walked over to the table and opened the bottle of whisky he had brought with him. He poured a glass for himself and one for his friend, who, as always, refused it at first but would succumb to the temptation sometime later. “Perhaps you are right, but no man could live long enough to see it.”

  “God would see it,” said the priest, “and it would become dear to him. No whisky for me,” he waved his hand dismissively at the glass. “I don’t drink whisky.”

  Joseph smiled. “Yes, you do,” he said, “but if you wish it to warm by the stove for a moment or two, that’s your business.”

  “Beautiful ruins are the skeletons of fine architecture, I would say. They show us that the edifice had good bones from the beginning.”

  “You don’t have this in mind for your church, I hope, this disintegration, this process of ruination.”

  Father Gstir laughed. “Not at all. Not, at least, in the beginning. But I want it built with strong bones so that if hundreds of years from now … if it is ever abandoned … it will become a wonderful ruin up there on that hill.”

  “Always remember the bones,” Joseph Becker would say to his granddaughter after relating this story. “They last the longest and explain the life history of people, monuments, sculpture. Without them everything else falls apart. With them the inner secret of each structure survives. Too many carvings have no bones, so termite and woodworm can destroy them utterly … or weather, or war. Think always when you are working of the strong ribcage of your abbess, think of the long bones in her thighs. If you don’t keep them in mind they won’t be there and then she will be nothing more than drapery and skin, beautiful in its folds and gathers but always verging on collapse. When the bones are perfect, skin and cloth move over the frame the way grass and trees and streams adorn a mountain, making it this particular mountain, or that. Still when we look at it we see a mountain … not an alpine pasture or a waterfall. The bones, you see, are what we remember.”

  Klara had never seen a mountain and made this point to her grandfather. He had walked out of his barn workshop then and had returned with a small boulder from the nearest field. “This will be your mountain,” he had told her. “Take it home with you and keep it near your carving hand.”

  When Klara later told the story of Father Gstir’s belief in ruins to the nuns, she took the boulder her grandfather had given her to show her friends. One Sister felt she should anoint the boulder with holy water. As she did so Klara, watching the liquid run down the surface of
the rock, felt she could actually see the European pastures and waterfalls her grandfather had carried with him in his mind.

  Klara’s brother, Tilman, had known nothing at all about the circumstances of his birth or, to be more precise, the circumstances of his conception. Certainly it was not the kind of information one would impart to a child, but had he had contact with his mother or his father after he was twelve years old, would they have been likely to tell him this story? It is doubtful, sexual congress between one’s parents being a topic usually avoided by those parents and their children alike. Besides, the moment was one that, if remembered at all, was recalled with a hint of shame, representing the first instance when the young man and the young woman who would become the parents of Tilman (and later of Klara) revealed to the other something of the broken and sharp-edged side of their natures.

  Dieter Becker had never been a hunter, and yet when approached in November of 1892 by some other young men in the parish, he had agreed to meet them the following Saturday at the edge of the same swamp through which Father Archangel Gstir had tramped almost a quarter-century before.

  The day in question had begun for Dieter in cerulean darkness; a passel of knife-point stars in the inky morning sky could be seen through the window glass, but there was no moon. After bacon by coal oil lamp, he shouldered his seldom-used shotgun and left his young wife, Helga, preparing to make sweet tomato pickle with the late crop that had ripened in her garden. Already the slop pail was filling with skins boiled off the surfaces of ripe fruit, and the air of the kitchen was rife with a sweet, acid smell.

  By the time the bright, low light of the day was at its most intense, Dieter had proved to his companions that he had a prodigious natural talent with the gun that he had only hours before learned to use properly. He had found that he could predict the exact angle of a flight path determined by panic or the movements of a swimming bird duped by a decoy. The sport came to him with such ease that by the afternoon he had tired of it, and grasping a half-dozen or more birds, he made his excuses and set off for home. He had tired of the sport but not of the flush of excitement his success had pumped through his veins, and he anticipated, with great pleasure, the delivery of the bleeding trophies to his wife.

  He entered a humid kitchen whose windows had been fogged by hours of boiling pots and into which crept the muted red light of the early sunset. His normally blue eyes were blackened by enlarged pupils, and the smell of blood was on him. Helga, to her embarrassment, recognized his lust, and for the first time in her marriage felt desire rising in her own body. After he threw the brace of birds on a wooden chair, the husband and wife stood face to face in the dwindling light, like silent enemies. Then they fell groaning to the floor beside the stove, where they struggled to extract this new terrible pleasure from the other. Helga could see, as she and Dieter beat against each other, the wing of one not quite dead bird methodically slapping the pine planks, yet by the time they had finished, the feathers were entirely still. The image, though she never spoke of it, stayed with her all through her pregnancy.

  Within twenty-four hours all relations between the couple would be enacted with the same courteous affection that had become a part of their marriage. Dieter never hunted again but dreamed, nonetheless, some autumn nights of dogs that were not his own bringing trophy after trophy to his feet.

  Though Tilman knew about pathmasters, had seen men working at maintenance, and had been told by his father about earlier days when the trees were felled and the stumps removed, he could almost believe that the roads were natural phenomena like rivers or forests. Maps themselves couldn’t hold his attention, and yet the interlaced branches of a tree outside his window, a spider’s web—even his sister’s braided hair—were like Wanderkarten to him, one line leading the eye to another, and then another. The large tartan made by the concession lines and the King’s highways was just a logical extension of this, so that to his mind the lane that extended from the barn to the edge of the farm had been put there not as a temptation exactly but more as an invitation that should be accepted now and then.

  He feared the disappearance of the roads due to lack of use, could imagine them vague with weeds, then lost forever in the texture of woods and meadows. As a much younger child he had been made aware of this possibility when a path he had beaten from the house to the creek filled in with wildflowers during a late-spring week when his parents had succeeded in convincing him to go to school. This had terrified him so much that his sleep had suffered and he had woken with a start far too early each morning, rousing the rest of the house with the shrill, relieved announcement that the lane that ran from the yard to the concession line was still there, had not been erased during the night.

  School had been impossible for him. The road that had taken him there passed beneath the three large windows of the schoolhouse, and teams of horses and the odd passing delivery wagon made him feel that he himself might be moving backward while they were progressing forward. He could not learn to read or write or even how to remain in his seat. The white marks on the blackboard frightened him, as did the fact that the desks were bolted to the floor. No one, nothing could make him stay, neither the schoolmaster’s switch nor his father’s harsh words, though the boy made the attempt, over and over, to attend, walking sometimes halfway to the schoolhouse before turning and running back to the farm. Eventually he was permitted to remain at home on the farm, where he roamed the lanes the workhorses took to the back fields or followed the paths the cattle had made through the woodlot. The appearance of the truant officer had seemed to his parents to precipitate his first full-blown departure. But it was really the sight of migrating birds sweeping across the sky and the low angle of the silver October light that had caused him to leave, though no one would ever know that for certain but himself.

  That first time he had moved south as if by instinct, had slept shivering in barns on the edges of Ontario towns named after great European cities—London, Brussels, Paris—and eventually on the outskirts of villages that wore the names of spas or palaces—Leamington, Blenheim. At times, like an animal on the verge of hibernation, he would sleep for two or three days, but finally hunger would awaken him and drive him toward the more industrial centres of Woodstock or Chatham and the bins of garbage stored behind brick hotels filled with commercial travellers. It was at this point that he became aware of his own magnetism—something he had never thought about before—how it affected the adults on town streets, how it made them want to give him things: a doughnut perhaps or a stick of candy. Once, responding to his angelic face, his tattered clothing, and his almost ethereal thinness, a woman crossed the street and handed him a basket of groceries without saying one word. He feasted for days, delighted by his luck. But if anyone questioned him, asked where he came from, where he was going, or what he was doing, he would disappear before they finished speaking, making certain to turn a corner or slip into a woodlot so they could no longer see him.

  He received comfort, warmth, and information from animals, from the horses and cows with whom he often slept and from the great congregations of birds whose numbers multiplied as he moved deeper into the southern part of the province. The honking clamour, the panting noise made by beating wings had pulled him down the flat, dusty roads of Essex County until the birds abandoned him in the marshlands on the edge of Lake Erie. There he stood weeping among bulrushes as tall as himself while flock after flock set out across an expanse of water that stretched as far as the horizon. It seemed to him then that he had come to the edge, to the end of the world.

  No matter how far he had travelled, Tilman had never been lost. As long as he was on a road or beside a creek or a river, he knew he would eventually find himself in a recognizable situation. Stay near something that leads to something else was his motto, and Always know which street gets you out of town was his creed. He would later claim that when there was no sun to guide him he could determine by certain smells which direction the wind was coming from. But this unforda
ble body of water suggested chaos, an end to the pattern of the roads, the beginning of the idea that there might be nowhere else to go. Repulsed by the overwhelming quantity of liquid, he turned away, began a trek northeast.

  Tilman had returned, at the end of this first journey, to a home that was sombre under a weight of grief, the search parties having given up in despair two weeks previously, his mother, father, and sister dressed in black. His father had whipped him then, for the first and the last time, but in a halfhearted way, the act really being an expression of relief.

  That winter Tilman taught himself how to read by making use of the pictures and captions in a Butler’s Lives of the Saints that Father Gstir’s successor, Father Gallagher, an Irishman, had given to the boy when he had shown some interest in a reference the priest had made to the Voyages of Brendan in a sermon after mass. And each day he walked back and forth to his grandfather’s farm and the old man’s workshop, where, occasionally, he could be coaxed into mastering some basic carving technique. It seemed to his parents that with these efforts at self-education he had begun to settle. But when great numbers of birds began to pass over the house in the spring, he began a journey north. This time he was halted not by the obstacle of water, though there was a plethora of lakes in the vicinity, but by a wall of dense forest. Roads were what pushed him forward, and past the town of Lakefield, the roads petered out in a tangle of bush. This disappointed him, but at least the forest was on solid ground, suggesting that some sort of track might be made through it. And the spring journey had not the urgency of the one taken in autumn, did not carry with it the feeling that, if not taken at all, an important life-giving part of him would be extinguished.