The Stone Carvers Page 9

  The nuns, sensing a current of passion and imagination running beneath Klara’s serene expression and good deportment, suggested a course of study that included much reference to female saints who had been abbesses rather than those who had been visionaries or martyrs, hoping that the practical side of the young girl’s nature would be encouraged by their example of hard work and selfless attention to others. Klara’s idle hands, they suspected, might be the Devil’s playground.

  The lamb had begun shyly to inch its way back into the barn. “Come,” said Joseph, holding out his hand, “come back in here now and stay out of mischief. If the old woman sees you with flowers in your mouth, you’ll be eating parsley and mint on Sunday.” The animal stayed near the door, looking at Klara warily. “Oh, she’s all right,” said her grandfather. “She won’t hurt you.”

  “Would my abbess ever have been in love?” Klara asked. “I need to know for the carving, for the face.”

  Joseph Becker looked skeptical. “Of course,” he said wryly, “for the carving. Perhaps you should be asking such questions about the Irish saints.”

  Klara flushed but said nothing. Her father, she now knew, had been speaking about Eamon’s visits. She imagined him laughing and winking as he described the boy.

  “Father Gstir always claimed the Irish saints were the most passionate,” her grandfather continued. “Passionate believers, passionate travellers, passionate scholars, passionate speakers. Might they not have been, at some time during their lives, passionate lovers as well?”

  In the spring of 1868, the young Joseph Becker had worked on the model of Father Gstir’s church in the early-morning hours, beginning by the light of a lantern, then moving outside when the first glow of dawn became strong enough for him to see by. He made use of leftover cedar shingles from the despised sawmill and horse-hoof glue that he kept simmering on his stove during the few short hours he was able to sleep. He had never done this kind of work before, but as a boy had admired the gorgeous branching of Veit Stoss’s lacelike sculptural work and so was able to understand the beauty of a structure through which a breeze might be able to blow and light might be able to shine. The beauty of line, and then the clear air.

  Father Gstir was full of instructions—mostly concerning the Gothic style he had decided was right for his project. The nave, the side aisles, the radiating chapels, the tracery, and the bits of coloured cloth meant to represent splendid stained glass. A tympanum! Could Joseph carve a miniature Christ in Majesty? Should there not be buttresses? Flying buttresses?

  Joseph, overworked as he was, refused to make miniature altars, miniature statues of the Virgin.

  “But we will need money for the interior as well,” Father Gstir said, “for the altars and the magnificent pulpit. And you, Joseph, you will be the carver of these wonders. What about the baptismal font? Ludwig must know that we need money for all of it.”

  “I am only one man,” said Joseph.

  “Think of what you will learn,” enthused the priest.

  “I only wanted to carve limewood figures. I have never wanted to make a toy church.”

  “We’ll need relics,” said Father Gstir, ignoring this last statement. “Yes, we must have relics. I will apply to Rome immediately for relics.” Weather, the entity that in this terrain was the most impossible to dismiss, sprang immediately to mind. “We will need protection from storms and particularly, because of the church’s high elevation, from lightning, so I will write to Rome today for relics of Saint Sebaldus and Saint Vitus.” Father Gstir slapped his cheek. A smear of blood remained on his skin. The priest seemed lost in thought. “Saint Narcissus,” he said at last. “We must have protection from insect bites as well.”

  Joseph was beginning to feel he needed protection from Father Gstir. “I will not make tiny relics,” he announced.

  The priest was shocked. “Make relics?” he cried. “Only God and the saints can make relics.” He crossed himself.

  “Perhaps you should hire a saint to make this toy church,” said Joseph under his breath while removing a pot of bubbling glue from the stove.

  “I heard you,” said Father Gstir, shaking his finger in the direction of his friend, “but remember, this toy church is a model of the house of God!”

  Both men were silent for a moment. Then the priest spoke again. “And we will need a bell,” he ventured. “We will need a little iron bell for the model. The king must understand that the church is incomplete without a bell.”

  “A bell,” muttered Joseph. “In this whole territory I have not seen one bell.”

  “First a small one, then a large,” said the priest.

  With a thin brush, Joseph began to apply glue to the edge of the miniature porch.

  “A cowbell!” said Father Gstir. “That will be just the thing.”

  “Too large.”

  “A goat’s bell then.”

  “Have you seen any goats here? I have not seen a single goat since I left Bavaria.”

  “I will write to the bishop in Hamilton for a small bell,” the priest announced, undaunted. “He will surely find one.” He opened his arms and lifted his smiling face toward the morning sun that shone through the window of Joseph’s workshop. Then, abruptly, he turned and looked at the younger man. “You must not be discouraged,” he said. “The little church will come easily to you. And the finishing touches of your Virgin and your Crucifixion. I will pray to Saint Olaf and Saint Blaise, both patrons of carvers, and the little church will practically finish itself.”

  Four weeks later, in the middle of June, on a bright, clear morning, the one hundred and fifty-seven souls who made up the parish of the Township of Carrick began to emerge from the northern forest on a variety of tracks. A number of the parishioners had two or three unfortunate-looking animals in tow, and some of the women carried infants in their arms. But what they had left at home were shanties and huts that barely kept out the cold, greasy fireplaces, animals too sick to travel, buried babies, mud, and a bone-chilling fear of the dispirited native peoples whom they had all but forced out of the vicinity—though one or two Ojibway had joined the crowd on this morning to see what the fuss was about.

  And what had these people in mind to see? Few knew, other than they were going to witness something someone had done, a project completed for reasons other than survival, which, to a settler, would seem an act of pure madness, likely to result in sudden death. That anyone, even a priest, would waste valuable time in this terrain making a parade, would cause painted objects to be carried around in the company of a group of sad backwoods animals, seemed to them to be so absurd that they couldn’t resist the novelty. None of them had ever been to a fair, or a dance, or a strawberry social. Few had even spent time at their neighbours’ houses. And many had never even set eyes on their fellow citizens from the southern part of the province, some of whom were arriving by buggy at the same moment, on the better though still rough track that came up from Goderich and spilled down toward the two mills of the officially unrecognized village of Shoneval.

  The splendidly robed Father Gstir, who had solemnly taken his place at the head of what he hoped would soon be something resembling a Corpus Christi procession, held aloft on top of a pole the model church Joseph Becker had finished to the last tiny cedar shake on the miniature roof. When the good Father pivoted to bark orders to the assembling participants, he could hear the tinkling of the bell the bishop had sent from Hamilton by special messenger just days before. Behind the priest, flushed with pride, stood one of the larger mill workers, who had secretly completed a model of a brewery while Joseph was working on the church. After some discussion, Father Gstir had agreed that this small edifice might also be carried on a pole in the procession. He, himself, had taken note of the suitability of the bubbling streams of Shoneval for the making of beer and was happy to hear that the men had been praying for anything at all.

  When the mill workers got wind of this, a burst of activity ensued during which the men engaged in hasty and
considerably less than skilful model-making after hours, creating renditions of structures they either remembered fondly from their pasts or fervently hoped would appear in their futures. All claimed to have been petitioning God and the Blessed Virgin for such architectural works, and so what could Father Gstir do but agree to their participation in what was becoming a very colourful Corpus Christi procession. Some now carried the fortified farms of their Bavarian childhoods, some carried the castles they remembered standing on distant European hills. One carried a dovecote, one carried a medieval wash house. One man, whom Father Gstir had presumed to be the least religious of the lot, carried a convent and another, who came from Munich, carried an opera house. Two men who had clearly worked together on the tavern model now stood arguing over who should be permitted to carry it, and one thin, ascetic-looking mill worker carried a brightly painted, turreted, and gargoyled building that only he, and God (whom he had been petitioning for same), knew was a brothel.

  Joining them now was the unhappy collection of pasture animals loaned by the settlers for this festive day, many having been driven as far as fifteen miles through the bush. Almost all of them, at the priest’s suggestion, had been decorated after a fashion with berries and grapevines and wildflowers. One cow was so completely covered with ears of Indian corn she appeared to be wearing a complicated suit of armour. Several tired-looking horses were complaining and shaking their heads, attempting to remove the wreaths their owners had attached to their bridles.

  Two powerful mill workers struggled with Joseph’s crucifix, and four more held aloft the Virgin and Child on a platform they carried on their shoulders. Much earlier in the morning the Irishman had begun to play a series of reels, and, as the hours wore on, he was able, with the help of an accordion player, to incite the singing of songs not altogether appropriate to the occasion.

  What with all the building of model architecture, and talk of music and festivities, and rumours of sumptuous outdoor altars being created for “popish and pagan worship in the woods,” news of the procession had reached as far as such civilized and somewhat industrialized centres as Listowel and Stratford, and just as Father Gstir was attempting to instill some order into the proceedings, the bell on his church jingling angrily, a contingent of grim-faced Orangemen dismounted from carriages and strode purposefully toward the crowd.

  Father Gstir, who had never seen an “orange man,” naturally enough believed that, if and when one appeared in his life, he would be dressed in pumpkin-coloured clothing and, as a result, readily recognizable. He therefore welcomed these vibrantly sashed visitors warmly and told them how delighted he was by their intention to add their splendid drums to the musical element of the procession, despite the plethora of Gaelic invectives their appearance had caused to issue from the mouth of the fiddle player. The Orangemen were placed somewhere near the middle of the parade, and after a minute or two of confused hesitation, they fell in line, agreeing amongst themselves that their participation could only be beneficial.

  Years later Joseph Becker would entertain his granddaughter with stories of this day: how the procession had visited the four outdoor altars, one situated in each corner of the acre that would hold the church and the graveyard, made by Father Gstir himself from cedar boughs. He described how one of the Orangemen had insisted that the white horse that had pulled his carriage should be unhitched so that she might enter the parade (and how that horse, in full view of the crowd, had been mounted by one of the backwoods horses, who turned out not to be so tired after all), and how the entire gathering had feasted on picnic lunches at the site of the future church.

  Three months later a log church, built by the mill workers, stood on the spot, and near the springs in the valley, an enterprising couple lured to Shoneval by the procession were beginning to build a brewery. The Orangemen, full of fellowship and food, had announced before leaving that they would return each June at the feast of Corpus Christi, Father Archangel Gstir blessing them as they stepped into their carriages and rolled away toward the south.

  Klara found the notebook lying on the floor of the shop. Someone had tossed it into her workspace while she was not there. She could almost hear the slap it would have made as it hit the worn boards of the floor, her abbess the only witness to its delivery.

  A triangle of intense sunlight brought it to Klara’s attention now as she opened the door. The leather cover was the same colour as Eamon’s belt—handmade by him. Embossed on its surface was the word “Songs.”

  She picked the volume up and let it fall open in her hands. The words were small, printed in pencil, many of them misspelled. The random lines her eyes lit on read thus:

  A black frost has withered my heart

  She has taken the light from the hills of Cloonaughlin

  And I and my life are apart

  The lake is a shield of mahogany darkness

  The colour, the weight of her hair …

  Klara snapped the book shut and stared hard into the stern face of the abbess, the face she had refined with her grandfather’s chisels just the day before. A combination of panic and despair sang in her blood, and when she put the book down on the work table she saw that the shape of her fingers had been printed on its cover by the sweat of her hand.

  The windows of her little shop were thick with spiderwebs. “Don’t remove the spiders,” her grandfather had told her. “They are just being who they are and have always loved, never harmed wood.” But suddenly she needed a clear view, needed light and air. As she scraped the book over each pane of glass, the old webs clung to it, a gauzy, pale membrane encrusted with sawdust. Klara opened the book again and read, It’s you who has left my heart shaken, with a hopeless desperation as before you I stand. She felt her throat begin to constrict with emotion. Such anguish on the page. Whose mahogany hair, the rich colour of the cover of this book? Why this abandonment, loss? The savagery with which these anguished words cut into the mind! She’d heard nothing, she’d seen nothing like them before. And a whole book of them.

  She placed the volume on a table, stood staring at it with her fingers lightly touching its edge. Then she picked up a chisel and the mallet and approached the sculpture. Squatting beside the wooden abbess, she began hastily to carve a fold into the swelling hem, breaking a piece of the skirt in the process. There would be a flaw now forever in the piece, Klara realized. She threw down her tools, snatched the small book from the table, and walked out the door.

  Far back behind the woodlot, the farm midden was a spreading mound of discarded medicine bottles, broken wagon wheels, pottery shards, rotted fenceposts, and rusting bed-springs. Klara tossed the book onto the heap, then walked resolutely away from the spot. On the stoop of the house she changed her mind, sprinted back across the field, through the woods, lifted the book from the top of the heap, and stuffed it in the bodice of her work apron. The stove was a better alternative, she decided. What if her father went to the midden, found the book, and read the offending verses?

  The book stayed where it was, near her heart, all through the preparations for the evening meal. At the table she asked her father for the first time about his courtship of her mother, then immediately wished that she hadn’t, afraid the question might be interpreted as a kind of confession on her part.

  Dieter, however, was obviously pleased by her curiosity. “She was our hired girl—we got her from the nuns when she was six and I was seven,” he told his daughter. “So it seemed I’d known her all my life. The nuns had already taught her how to sew, which pleased mother.” He paused here and leaned back in his chair, remembering. “I suppose I felt there wouldn’t be any need for a courtship on account of us always knowing each other. I do recall, though, that one day I was surprised by the fact that she’d become beautiful. Until then, she would have been just like a sister.”

  Klara wanted to ask how a brother would feel about a sister, her own experience having been cut so short, but she didn’t want to stop her father now that he’d begun to talk.
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  Dieter held his empty fork in his hand while he looked inward. “I took her with me to the fall fair in Listowel. We went in the wagon, alone, all the way there and back again. After that everything changed. She seemed to expect me to marry her, though all we’d done was ride out alone together. Or maybe it was me expecting to marry her.” He plunged his fork in his food and began to eat again. “Anyway, it happened. We got married. And then a few years later Tilman was born.”

  The mention of the boy brought silence back into the kitchen as surely as if both Klara and her father had forgotten how to speak. Even now, all these years later, there was nothing that could induce Dieter to enter Tilman’s vacant room, where the small jackets and trousers still hung in the closet and a book about Saint Brendan’s voyages, which Father Gallagher had never had the heart to reclaim, still lay on the table. And under the table, side by side, stood a pair of good black Sunday boots, as if the boy had just taken them off after mass.

  Several times during the evening Klara remembered that she had intended to burn the book, but with her father in the room she reasoned this could not be accomplished. All through the washing of the dishes, while she scraped the remnants of their meal from their plates and lowered crockery into the suds, the words ran in her mind, becoming constant, like the sound of a brook that passes near a window. It’s you who has left my heart shaken, and I and my life are apart. Her father looked at her quizzically from across the table. “What is it, Klara?” he finally asked. “Are you feeling poorly?” The book right there against her heart, and sometimes, to her utter amazement, the knowledge that it was there brought tears to her eyes.