The Stone Carvers Read online

  After that his disappearances were sporadic, and short-lived, and did not involve much distance. Often he would walk to a neighbouring town, where he would linger for a few days and news of him would be relayed back to his father’s farm by milk wagons or by the rural post. When he returned, most often at meal time, he would slip unceremoniously into his seat at the kitchen table. With time his family learned that it was pointless to ask him where he had been.

  It was his mother who had sensed that he would someday leave forever, and that his disappearance would take place in the autumn during the same hunting season when he had been conceived. She knew she couldn’t bear to lose him. When he was home she would rise sometimes six or seven times in the night to check his room. At the table, noon and suppertime, her face drawn with exhaustion, she would often threaten him with unspecified punishments were he to go missing again. As the summer progressed she insisted he should not leave the yard, then the house, and eventually she tried to confine him to whatever room she happened to be in. Tilman responded neither to her questions nor to her attempts at incarceration and intimidation but looked at her with confusion on his perfect face, once enraging her with what she believed was insolence when he invited her to come along with him on his next “walk.” Despite his wife’s insistence, Dieter refused to beat him again after this incident, sent him instead to his room in disgrace, then turned to her and said, “You might try some kindness, Helga. Some kindness might make him want to stay.” Later, slipping into her brother’s room, Klara offered to go with him since her mother would not. But Tilman refused the gesture. “You’re too small,” he said, “and you’d get your dresses dirty.”

  Though infuriated by the notion that it was she that Tilman was trying to escape from, and barely speaking to her husband as a result, Helga Becker made some attempts at enticement. As if trying to redesign her son’s character, or to hold his body in one spot, she made more and more severely tailored, formal clothes for him, going so far as to add gold buttons and piping, and once even a velvet collar. Tilman wore these costumes briefly, walking stiffly around the house on the day they were presented to him. But always he appeared the following morning in his old dungarees and a torn flannel shirt. At the beginning of September, Helga reverted to interrogating the boy mercilessly about his thoughts and plans, and when he wouldn’t answer, she wept openly in his presence. At the end of the month during which he turned twelve, and after one or two more brief absences, his mother became convinced that his permanent removal from her life was at hand. She pleaded with him to stay. By the beginning of October, the tension in the house had become unbearable.

  When Dieter began the autumn ploughing, he encouraged the boy to accompany him to the fields. This Tilman did for a while, walking beside the slow, stately procession of the four large, dignified workhorses. His distressed mother, watching this from the kitchen window, had the premonition that when the last furrow was finished, the boy would be gone. The grandfather had failed to interest him in any carving projects. He had grown even more silent at the table, and had taken to looking early in the morning out the south windows of the rarely used parlour, as if there were something there calling to him, something that no one else could see.

  The birds arrived suddenly and in great clamorous numbers, descending like dark rain into distant ponds or sailing noisily overhead like storm clouds moving in a strong wind. Helga panicked and locked the door of Tilman’s room one morning while he was still sleeping, but he escaped by the window—how, she never knew—and appeared as usual at breakfast without a word to her about what had taken place. Later that day she took the boy’s measurements to the blacksmith and returned with a hinged iron harness attached to a long iron chain. She wept and pleaded until her husband brought a cot to the woodshed, then she stood beside him while he nailed the chain to the door jamb.

  “Only,” she said, “until winter comes. Only until then.”

  “The boy will not submit to it,” Dieter said. “He will not put it on.”

  “I can’t lose him,” Helga turned from her husband and ran her fingers almost tenderly along the iron links. “I won’t permit that to happen.” And then when he didn’t answer, she added softly, still not meeting his eyes, “He’ll be able, this way, to be outside. It won’t be like a prison.”

  “Are you mad? A person in chains is always in a prison,” Dieter stepped in anger toward the door.

  She clutched his sleeve in her hand. “You must make him wear it,” she said desperately, almost hysterically. “You must force him to put it on.”

  “And how am I to do that?”

  Dieter and Helga stood face to face: he breathing quickly, wanting to escape to his fields, she looking past his shoulder at the horizon that had so often enticed her son. Each hated the other and themselves for their part in Tilman’s confinement. “You’re bigger than he is,” Helga said finally.

  When Klara had been sent to bed in her room upstairs after a supper filled with a silence so profound she would recall it later as a fifth person at the table, Dieter coaxed his son into the woodshed. Golden light from the kitchen lamps entered through the connecting door, and silver light from the partial moon shone through one cloudy window.

  “You’re to sleep here now,” he said to the boy. Only the foot of the cot was visible in the block of light entering from the kitchen. “You’ll be our guard,” he explained, “for foxes in the hen house.”

  “Do I have to shoot them?” asked Tilman, who had begun to undress. He was fond of foxes.

  “No, no shooting,” Dieter placed his hand on his son’s shoulder, “but leave your clothes on. You may be required to be up in the night, just to yell at them.”

  The boy climbed between the flannel sheets. Dieter could see the harness. It was hanging from a hook on the opposite wall where a slice of moonlight appeared to have chopped the iron bars in half.

  Tilman was pleased by the proximity of the outdoors. “I’ll like to sleep here,” he said.

  His father did not answer but left the connecting door slightly ajar when he walked back into the kitchen.

  A dreaming child is like a weed underwater, each limb languid, heavy beneath a depth of sleep. Dieter was able to position and then close the harness around Tilman’s frail ribs and shoulders without disturbing his rest. Only once, with the sound of the lock clicking shut, did his eyes fly open, but he was not really awake and the lids lowered again one second later.

  The next morning, however, everyone in the house was hurled into consciousness by the terrible sound of Tilman’s howls as he flung himself to the end of his chain again and again. Around him his own dog ran in large, free circles, barking and snapping, as if the boy were already a stranger in the yard.

  Helga would never recover—not from his imprisonment and not from his escape.

  For the first few days on the chain the child would not eat at all, though his mother baked his favourite pies and stirred lumps of chocolate into mugs of warm milk. On the third day, he called repetitively for food and ate ravenously as if storing energy or building strength. Klara tried to talk to him in the yard, but he wouldn’t answer, and even while gobbling stew or eating porridge his eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

  Dieter, unable to bear the sight of the boy straining at the end of the chain, or the sound of his cries, left the house before dawn and returned to it in darkness when he hoped all were asleep. On the fourth night something growled at him when he crossed the yard, and he realized that Tilman had not gone indoors to sleep though the season was well enough advanced that there was a hard frost on the ground.

  Dieter sat down on the stoop beside the curled form that his son made in the dark. He tried to touch Tilman’s shoulder, but the boy twitched away from him.

  “Tilman,” he began, “your mother is half mad with worry about you, and me too, wondering what will become of you if you go off again. Would you give me your word that you’ll stay?”

  The boy began to whimper.


  His father continued, “How will you look after yourself? How will you learn to be a man?”

  There was nothing but silence now from Tilman, as if he might have decided to listen. His father put his head in his hands and, after a few moments, looked up at the stars. “Tomorrow we’ll fetch Father Gallagher, and if he says you should stay, and you promise him that you will, we will set you free.”

  Dieter heard the chain rattle somewhere in the darkness. Tilman had shifted his position. He had stopped whimpering, but his father could hear him breathing, quick and sharp, near his elbow.

  “You see,” he said to the boy, “we are all tied to a place.” He coughed into his hand. “We’re stuck to it. What if I were just to up and leave? What if I were just to wander off? Then who would keep the fields?”

  “There’s fields everywhere,” said Tilman quietly.

  “And everywhere,” said his father, “there’s a man keeping them.”

  The boy said nothing more. Somewhere in a nearby pasture filled with shadows and silver, a horse whinnied.

  “Will you stay, son?” his father asked. “Will you just stay home? Will you promise if the priest says so that you won’t go off again?”

  Tilman took the chain in his hands, then scrambled to his feet. He ran back and forth in an arc at the far end of the moonlit yard until the taut links cut across his father’s shins. “I won’t stay,” he called fiercely toward the house. “I want to go,” he screamed. “I want to go!”

  The next morning Tilman’s howling started at the same moment as the birds began to sing, at the first suggestion of light. His cries were taken up by dogs all over the county—a kind of relay of despair—so that sleepers ten and fifteen miles away were unknowingly disturbed by the boy’s anguish, their last dreams of the morning being those of confinement or attempted escape.

  His mother writhed in agony in the sheets, her hands against her ears. Klara, in her small white room, sat straight up in her bed, then ran across the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door, before she knew she was awake. She circled the house until she found Tilman thrashing in the yard at the end of his chain, flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were unfocused. He didn’t see her at all.

  “Stop it!” she screamed, flinging her body into his path, her fists pummelling flesh and the iron that encircled it. “You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re all gone wrong!”

  He stopped then and looked at Klara as if he’d never seen her before. She could see the harness rising and falling as he panted. He smelled of stale sweat.

  Whirling away from him she ran into the house and used the pump at the sink to fill a large pot, then back in the yard she tossed water at him as if to quench the fire she sensed was in his bones. “Stop it!” she yelled again, and in her confusion and sorrow she threw the empty pot against the house. “You’re bad,” she sobbed. “You never stop being bad.”

  Tilman stood still, panting and staring at his ten-year-old sister. “I’ve stopped,” he said, and then her name, “Klara.”

  Her feet were numb. The grass was crisp with frost and the morning cold caused her teeth to chatter.

  Upstairs, in the sudden silence, the exhausted parents tumbled again into a deep well of sleep.

  He repeated her name, Klara, as if he’d never said it before, as if she’d never heard it before.

  Every one of his ribs was bruised, the skin above them covered in plum-coloured blossoms. When he pulled up his shirt to show this to his sister, it was as if he were exposing his heart.

  She winced and turned away. The colour of the morning in these few moments had changed from grey to golden.

  Tilman pointed to the blacksmith’s shed. “A hammer,” he said. “Get me the hammer with the claw foot,” and then her name again, “Klara.”

  She loved her brother, loved his beautiful face, even when it was contorted by rage, by fear. She fetched the hammer, then looked at the squint of concentration around Tilman’s eyes as he pried from the door the large bent nails that held his chain. He twisted away from her, leaping down the lane that led to the road. She returned to her room and stood at the window watching her brother growing smaller and smaller in the distance, heading west with the newly risen sun on his back. She placed her inner arm on the window frame, pressed her forehead against her wrist, and counted to one hundred in order to let him get away. When she lifted her head she could still see him, his shadow twice the height of a full-grown man stretching out in front of him, his chain trailing behind him like print on the page of the road, like the end, or the beginning, of a story.

  May of 1914 turned to June of 1914 and still Eamon stayed away from the Becker farm. Klara’s father made only one remark about the young man’s continuing absence, a remark that Klara suspected was delivered in order to save her pride.

  “I expect the men at O’Sullivan’s farm are just about as busy as we are here these days.”

  Klara said nothing. She hated his attempts at cheerful excuses. This desire to make ordinary all that was dark and unfathomable was a weakness in her father, a habit that had in the past stood in sharp contrast to her mother’s anguish, her mother’s fury. But he was also a man who, after his son’s disappearance, would do anything rather than risk one more drop of rain falling into the ocean of his own concealed despair. He had in constant effect an unshakable policy of neutral appeasement.

  “Almost haying time,” he added, while his daughter pretended not to be listening.

  They parted then, he leaving for the crops, she climbing the stairs to sew. She had been working every evening as long as the light lasted in order to finish a groom’s waistcoat for Albert Stechley, and a satin gown and a veil for her neighbour, Katrin Erb, his bride-to-be. Klara’s agreeing to work on the latter garment came dangerously close to dressmaking and would have shocked her mother, particularly because the fashions of the day inclined toward frills and laces and away from the strictly tailored.

  “A good suit is all a woman needs for a wedding,” her mother had always declared. “Anything else is mere frivolity.”

  The bride’s dress was to have a line of buttons descending in a perfectly straight row down the centre of the bodice to the waist, but because the gown hooked at the back, these were to be for decorative purposes only. The bride herself would have been contented with buttons covered by the same satin fabric as made up the rest of the dress, but Klara had determined that a little picture, or symbol, by which the day might be commemorated should decorate the buttons. A flower perhaps, or the sliver of a new moon, or an open fan. For all her hidden passion for such details Klara was nevertheless a great believer in uniformity; there would only be one symbol or picture repeated. The choice would be difficult.

  On this summer evening then, Klara sat cross-legged on the smooth surface of the large table in the sunroom surrounded by a semicircle of mother-of-pearl buttons, her back curved, her chin on one fist, her free hand picking up and then returning to its place one small object after another. Every now and then she lifted her head and squinted across the room in the direction of the tailor’s dummy and the unfinished gown that adorned it, then resumed her study of the buttons. Years later she would still remember the images before her that night: the profile of a woman, a rampant lion with a marcasite eye, the moon, a star, several flowers, a spider, an apple, a cross, clasped hands, a fleur-de-lys, a maple leaf, a book, a coat of arms, a crown, a ruined tower, a bird, a pair of birds, an urn, a broken column, and a sampling of geometric shapes.

  The top of the table that Klara sat upon, though over two feet wide, was made from a single board taken from one of the trees of the virgin forest that had filled the parish during Father Archangel Gstir’s time. This irreplaceable woodland had been felled with alarming swiftness, had been floated down rivers to sawmills, loaded on lake boats, then shipped down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean. There it had been conveyed by schooners to an island on the other side of the sea, an island referred to as the Motherland
. As a result of the Motherland’s insatiable hunger for lumber, sawmills had opened all over Upper Canada, had flourished, had made small fortunes for their owners, and had closed and fallen into ruin—in the space of thirty years. All that remained now of the vast army of trees were vestiges in certain pieces of pioneer furniture and the odd oversized floorboard in a country house.

  On that June evening, Klara sat on a slice of what had once been an extraordinarily large tree. The evening light moving through the window made an exact shadow of her head and shoulders in profile on the opposite wall.

  She had almost decided to use the button with the twinned birds when she heard footsteps on the stairs. At first she thought it was her father, who might be wanting a book from the pile he kept beside his bed, but it wasn’t long before she identified the sound as unfamiliar, tentative. The climber hesitated on the sixth step, then apparently descended to the fourth, which Klara recognized by its creak. (In the future Klara’s foot would never touch that spot again without her mind remembering.) At least a minute passed before the person on the stairs began to ascend once more, and this time the footsteps were swift and purposeful.

  Klara knew who it was, she knew who it was. And yet this knowledge did nothing to abate the shock of seeing Eamon O’Sullivan standing on the threshold of her sunroom tailor shop.

  Characteristically, he said nothing.

  “It’s been six weeks,” she heard herself declare in exasperation. “Six weeks—and now what do you want?”

  He remained silent, staring at her from the doorway. Klara saw that small drops of sweat had beaded near his hairline.