The Stone Carvers Read online

  In the midst of his silence and his scrutiny she felt the old anger returning, and she flushed and looked away from him. She dug her nails into her palm and counted to ten, not wanting to lose control. But it was too late, and she found herself confronting him with her scissors in her hand. “If you don’t say something,” she told him, “I’ll stab you with these scissors. I mean it, Eamon. I’ll cut your throat.”

  She didn’t mean it, of course, but she was somewhat unnerved by how much she almost meant it. She held the scissors pointed toward him like a gun. “I’m serious, Eamon,” she said. “I’ll cut your ears …”

  “I’ve come for a coat,” he announced.

  The hand that held the scissors dropped to Klara’s side. “Oh,” she said, “the coat. It’s hanging on a nail in the woodshed … to the right of the door.”

  “I spoke,” said Eamon. “I said something.” Klara could see colour enter his neck and climb up his face toward his hair. “But it isn’t my jacket that I’m after. I want you to make a waistcoat for me.”

  “Do you?” She was secretly pleased that he acknowledged her skill, aware of the necessary connection her sewing would make between them.

  He nodded, not looking at her.

  “I’ll have to measure you,” Klara said slowly, the horror of this now entering her mind. Then she looked him in the face with skepticism and said, “You don’t have the money for it, do you?”

  He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket, walked across the room, and flung the money on the table. “I’ve been working these two months at the brewery,” he told her.

  “The brewery,” Klara repeated.

  “Yes, and farming too.”

  Klara could not meet his gaze. “What colour do you want then?” she asked.

  “Red.”

  Klara had never made a red garment in her life. In fact, it was doubtful she had ever seen one, the costumes in her world being almost always black, white, or grey. “There is no excuse,” her mother had said, “for flashy colour. No good can ever come of it.” Then she took the bright pink hair ribbon that Klara had bought with a few pennies her grandfather had given her and dropped it into the stove. “Are you sure it’s red you want?” Klara asked dubiously.

  “Red,” Eamon said again with great certainty.

  “You can’t have a red waistcoat.”

  “And why can’t I?”

  “It wouldn’t do at all. No good will come of it.” Klara was horrified. She remembered that while she wept for the burning satin her mother had lectured her on the subject of subtlety and taste.

  “I want it to be red,” Eamon asserted. “Burgundy perhaps …”

  But he held his ground, was not to be dissuaded.

  Vanity, Klara thought, which according to her mother was the most common of the deadly sins, or at least the one most often exhibited in the presence of tailors.

  “My hair is black,” continued Eamon. “My eyes are green. Red goes well with both.”

  Klara hadn’t known his eyes were green, and was too uncomfortable now to confirm what he was saying. Just like a peacock, she thought.

  “Maybe,” Eamon said softly, “maybe you don’t know how to make a red waistcoat.” Gaining confidence from the argument that he believed he had won, he was now able to look her in the face.

  “Of course I do,” said Klara. “What possible difference could the colour make?”

  “None at all,” Eamon grinned. “So you’ll make it red then?”

  Klara sniffed, crossed the room to a set of shelves where she rummaged in a wooden box until she extracted a light brown measuring tape and a small black notebook. “I’ll have to measure you,” she repeated.

  Eamon, apparently exhausted by conversation but still smiling at his victory, slumped on a stool at the opposite end of the room.

  “Stand up,” Klara said.

  He stood.

  “Stand up straight.”

  Eamon squared his shoulders and thrust out his chin.

  Klara approached him. “The first measurement,” she said, “is the neck.”

  She placed the cool, flat tape on the back of his neck, drawing it together just over his Adam’s apple. She could feel his breath brushing her cheekbone as he repeated the words “the neck.”

  Klara wrote the number of inches in the small book under the heading Red (!) waistcoat for Silent Irish. “The next measurement is the bodice,” she informed him as she pushed her thumb against the hollow between his collarbones, then slid her fingers down the tape until it reached his homemade leather belt.

  “Are there more measurements?” Eamon asked while Klara was writing.

  “Oh yes, many,” she replied. “The next is the width of the chest at the shoulders.” She measured and recorded the information. “Then the width of the chest from beneath the arms.” She could hear his heart beating and, to her consternation, her own. “Turn around,” she said.

  He turned.

  She pulled the tape across his shoulders, surprised at their width after the slenderness of his torso. “Turn back,” she told him as she wrote again in the book. “Now the arm.”

  They were facing each other again. Klara ran the tape down Eamon’s arm.

  “Do you know,” he asked, his voice breaking slightly, “do you know that your hands are like doves?”

  Klara cleared her throat. “The waist,” she whispered, choosing to pretend she had not heard him and thanking God silently she had never made trousers.

  “You,” he said, “with your neck like a swan.” This statement was delivered when Klara had both arms around his middle and her cheek near his beating heart. “You who’ll have nothing to do with a man like me.”

  With shaking hands Klara recorded the measurement in her book. In her mind she ran out of the room, down the stairs, across the orchard, and into the cedar woods. “I’ll have to measure your hips,” she said uncertainly, keeping her gaze directed at the floor. “I’ll have to do that for the fit to be right.”

  He seemed not to hear her. “I’ll die of this,” he told her. “These words about you running and running through my mind.”

  She bent toward him, fixing her eyes on the dark printed numbers.

  “And me remaining silent for months and months, tasting the humiliation of knowing that once I spoke you’d be gone from me like a startled bird.”

  Doves, thought Klara, looking at her own hands. Doves. She looped the tape around the back of him and pulled it tightly across his hip bones. Now she seemed to be moving in a dream, through water.

  He put one hand on her hair. “Your hair,” he whispered.

  The panic in her was enough to make her wish for his old silence, her old impatience. Still she straightened and looked into his face. Green eyes.

  “Do you never think of me?” he implored.

  “Never,” Klara whispered. She was unaware that she still held the tape, taut, at the front of his body.

  “I’ll die of this,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth.

  Klara found that she was kissing him back and the surprise caused her throat to constrict. She let the tape fall from his hips and brought her hands up to her face. “Why, why must you have a red waistcoat?” she gasped, though it wasn’t at all what she meant to say.

  Eamon drew quickly away, then began to pace back and forth across the room. “I’ll leave the country,” he declared, “and you’ll not recall me for a moment. On you’ll go with your life, sitting by another man’s fire, while I’m an outcast moving from town to town, desperate at the very thought of you. I’ll die in the winter ditch like a dog.”

  He crossed the room and placed his hands on either side of her face.

  “But the waistcoat …” she began.

  “Is for my funeral,” he finished her sentence. “Make it well.”

  Then he bolted from the room and thundered down the stairs, leaving Klara shaking as she attempted to write his measurements in her little black book.

  She lay awake all nig
ht, flat on her back, sweating under a quilt made from scraps of broadcloth and feather stitched with scarlet embroidery thread. The quilt was much too heavy for the season and she wanted to remove it, but she was immobilized, paralyzed by the enormity of the experience in the sunroom. Her mother’s declarations concerning the frivolity of the female sex ran through her mind. That girl doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, doesn’t have the good sense God gave a goose. The few times she almost dissolved into sleep Eamon’s face bloomed on the edge of a dream and hovered over hers until she wanted to claw it out of the way. She was certain the scent of him had followed her into the bedroom.

  The thought of his desperation caused tears to fill her eyes. Then, inexplicably, she would find herself pounding the mattress on either side of her with her fists. Where in the world was she to get red broadcloth? She would have to send to Toronto for it, or maybe even farther, maybe as far as Montreal. French people—her mother had disapproved of French people—often wore flamboyant clothes, flashy colours.

  She tried to remember everything she could about him—from church, from school—but he had always been so quiet there seemed to be nothing to retrieve. Like her, he had been quick and capable in the classroom, but because he was a few years older, there had not been the usual competition between them. His family, she knew, was a little less tidy, a little less organized, and somewhat poorer than most in the predominantly German village, and Klara recalled her mother attributing this to their Irish background. His own mother went to mass more than was good for her, though Klara’s mother had to concede that with five children there was much to pray about. He had four sisters, all younger than himself.

  He had never really run with the other boys, though they had seemed to like him well enough, and he them. Preferring solitary activities and being handy in his own way, he had been a prodigious maker of kites and could be spotted on breezy days far off in the hills with something ungainly pulling like an angry fish on a string he held with both hands. Often his less successful projects could be seen as tattered and forlorn as ghosts tangled in the bare limbs of winter trees. Once, Klara had found a kite in early spring, soiled by mud and half-covered by old snow, out behind her barn.

  Klara rolled over on her side and suddenly remembered something. When they had been children, at the time when the whole village had been speaking of her brother’s disappearance, Eamon had told her that he could help her send a message to Tilman if she wanted. She had followed the boy home from school, and had gone with him into a plain brown shed. Suddenly she had been surrounded by the anxious movement and quavering noise of penned birds.

  “You write what you want to say on this piece of paper,” he had said, producing a scrap from his pocket, “then I’ll tie it to a bird and send it off to Tilman.”

  The birds were swarming around their feet like a dirty grey river. Klara was disgusted by them, and suspicious. “How will the bird know where Tilman has gone?” she asked.

  “They’ve flown everywhere,” Eamon assured her, “and they’ve seen everything. I’ll talk to this one,” he pointed to a bird with brown markings that was pecking at his boot. “I’ll talk to him and tell him to look for your brother.”

  Klara prepared her message on the windowsill of the shed in the dim light. “Dear Tilman,” she wrote with a pencil from her schoolbag, “Please send me a letter with this bird.” She knew better than to ask him to come home. “I made you a present,” she wrote instead, hoping to entice him. “See if you can find it.”

  “I’ve been training them for a year,” Eamon told her. “I have eighteen of them now.”

  Klara handed him the paper and watched as he rolled it up and fastened it to the bird’s leg. Outside the bird flew off into a cold winter sky.

  When she asked a few weeks later, Eamon told Klara that the bird had returned with the unanswered message still tied to its leg. She didn’t know which boy to distrust more: the one who always went away or the one who sent messages that could never be answered.

  I will die of this, she thought as the beginnings of birdsong entered her room and then realized with bewilderment that it was his voice saying this, speaking in her mind. At the first hint of light she rose from the bed to look out the window. The yard was a sensible grey colour, not a hint of red in it, but there was an ominous band of hot scarlet on the eastern horizon. Having no idea how she was going to live through the day, she didn’t dress but descended the stairs instead in her nightgown and bare feet.

  In the kitchen she made a pot of coffee and drank two cups. Then she went outside and bent over the rain barrel to wash her hair. Two crows were shrieking at each other from pine trees at opposite ends of the yard. She couldn’t decide whether they were engaged in a quarrel or an exchange of ribald jokes, but everything about their tone suggested sarcasm, insolence.

  Your neck like a swan. Klara hated herself for permitting the phrase to enter her mind as she drew her hair up from this same neck. She remembered that she had threatened to kill Eamon with the scissors, then began to imagine the coat she would make for him. This led to an image of his black hair and earnest green eyes, the look of a red garment, a white shirt under it, and his pale throat rising out of a collar. There was something about his own neck, but she couldn’t say exactly what it was. Klara flung her head back, and the water from her hair soaked her nightgown, which clung to her back like a membrane. She recalled that her wrist had rested on his neck for a few moments when they had fallen on the ice, and she blushed at the memory.

  All day she was alone with herself in a way she had never been before, looking inward, aware of each emotional shift. When she dressed that morning she stared at her body for the first time in a self-conscious way, as if it were someone else’s body altogether, the nipples hardening under her gaze. Then she put on her cotton summer clothes, and a smock, and left the house for her workshop. Once there she circled the roughed-out form of the abbess for some time without once being moved to pick up the chisel. The thought of Eamon clung to her the way the wet nightgown had clung to her back, and it seemed that there had not yet been invented an exercise that would help her peel him off.

  Finally, in the heat of noon, she unrolled her pattern paper on the sunroom floor and began to map out the shapes Eamon’s measurements suggested. All sounds were exaggerated, by her exhaustion and her preoccupation: the crackle of the paper, the squeaking of the pencil as she pushed hard against it. The house had recently been invaded by mud-dauber wasps—harmless enough, they didn’t sting—but they browsed in her vicinity, indolently, their long legs hanging in the air like frail threads. Her wakefulness felt more like drunkenness and drowsing. She crouched over the paper on the floor and considered hidden pockets for the inside of the garment. What would he protect there? She drew the darts with great concentration, frowning as she calculated their width and how they should taper, then she drew in the pieces of the pattern until the paper was filled with curved lines like a map. Eventually she lay on her stomach, her shoulders echoed by her drawing of his larger ones, her arms on the drawing of his sleeves, and fell asleep.

  When she awoke in midafternoon, and when she rolled up the large piece of brown paper, she was amazed to see that she had pushed the pencil so forcefully into the paper that the pattern she had drawn remained incised on the pine floor.

  That night as she teetered on the edge of sleep, Klara heard music so achingly sad, so astonishingly pure and clear, that her entire body was alert to the sound. She walked furtively over to the window, as if she feared she might awaken a number of unfamiliar ghosts or alternative selves. She saw then, far off in the blossoming orchard, under the light of a partial moon, a small narrow shape with bent arms raised like wings. The wind was down, so the fiddle music seemed to be the only element awake and moving in the night, as if all the grief in the world were distilled into this thread of sound whose destination was her window. Eamon’s father often played the fiddle at weddings, or at the tavern, and Eamon himself ha
d once played “O Tannenbaum” at a school Christmas pageant. Klara knew all this. And yet, by the following morning, she had almost convinced herself that the music and the figure in the orchard had been merely an unsettling dream.

  Then at breakfast, after her father had left the table, and while she sat gazing absently out the window with a half-finished bowl of oatmeal cooling in front of her, Klara saw something white begin to twitch, then launch itself skyward from the brow of the hill behind her father’s cow pasture—one of Eamon’s kites, though Eamon himself was hidden from view. The oddest-shaped kite she had ever seen, it nevertheless flew well in the early-morning breeze. Klara found herself smiling as she realized that he must have used his mother’s bedsheets or muslin curtains in an attempt to make the object look like a bird. A swan. A dove.

  The next day Klara awoke full of shame, sleep having manoeuvred her into the rational past, away from this preposterous present. She had allowed Eamon’s foolishness—his dramatics and his antics—to make her dreamy and idle, she decided. She was determined to get back to work on the wooden statue, to finish it by the end of summer, hoping that the combination of the work and the purposefulness and energy she wanted to carve into the woman’s face might strengthen her own character. The nuns had told her that any medieval abbess would necessarily have had to be practical. Apart from the day-to-day business of running an abbey, some had even delivered sermons, and some had actually lectured to bishops, cardinals, popes! She immediately banished the image of the scarlet apparel these dignitaries brought to her mind. But she would attend to the business of the waistcoat as well, completing it as soon as possible. It would be a task like any other task, and when it was accomplished she would be done with it. And done with Eamon too.

  She wanted to squeeze him out of her life, the way a dart tapers an article of clothing, the fabric loose and supple at the place the needle enters, completely conquered at the point where the thread ends: an accommodation, on the one hand, and a complete disguise, on the other, of what were unmentionable body parts. A breast, a buttock. Or parts that were only slightly less unmentionable: the place where the waist on a woman blossomed into a hip, or a shoulder rising toward the neck. Neck like a swan, she thought, then squirmed away from the reminder.