The Stone Carvers (10 page)

“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 had 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.

How had he managed to twist her attention, swing it round in the direction of his face, his long silences, and now his abrupt reappearance, that one kiss. Klara had read about passionate embraces, but in the books she loved they had always taken place out of doors, in English gardens or on sweeping moorland, not in a tailor’s workshop nor, for that matter, in a village like Shoneval. She had imagined that one day she would be approached by a man who would want to touch her, but in her imagination this individual was mature, worldly, could never be a boy she had known from school. No. He would have to come from somewhere else, from Europe, from Britain. She felt she had been abducted by Eamon in the midst of a journey to this other, unknown person, that he had cast a spell on her thoughts so that like his birds they would always return to him no matter how far they flew. Perhaps the carving would free her from this. She recalled with pleasure and relief certain periods of intense concentration when it would be as if she had fallen down a wooden well or had become lost inside a wooden cave, as if the world and its complicated inhabitants had disappeared, the only relationship in her life was developing between her and the figure emerging from the block. By the time you finish even the smallest figures, her grandfather had told her, you must know all about them: their habits, their weaknesses, what they had for supper yesterday, who their enemies are, where they spent last night. She had laughed then, but Joseph Becker remained unsmiling. This was the only way, he maintained, that one could make a statue live, make it affect those who came to look at it.

She decided to visit her grandfather now, wanting to borrow the delicate chisels she could not yet afford, chisels that would more precisely render the medieval woman’s face. She also wanted, under the circumstances, some instruction on concentration. But before she left the house she leafed through her catalogues until she found a good red worsted material that could be purchased from a firm in Montreal. Reeling at the expense, she nevertheless wrote a letter ordering the required yardage. Then she untied her apron and left the kitchen through the adjacent woodshed where her brother’s folding cot remained leaning against the wall in the shadows of the farthest corner as it had done for almost a decade. Feeling the sun on her face and hands as she walked down the lane that led to the road, her spirits lifted somewhat.

How beautiful the day was! Shoneval, finally at the peak of what Father Gstir had envisaged as its destiny, was filled with the flowering trees and shrubs of June. Lilac, spirea, cherry, and apple. Klara couldn’t help but notice the opulence of the display. As she walked past the brewery she could feel Eamon’s presence behind the soft yellow of the windowless brick wall. Even the small river that was the brewery’s driving force seemed to speak of him, its voice melodic, emotionally charged, the water moving and shining. Klara shook herself and walked away—though the bright afterimage remained behind her eyes as she walked past Hafeman’s store and up the hill toward Father Gstir’s magnificent church. When she cut through the cemetery she paused to cross herself at her mother’s grave, then wandered through marble stones and iron crosses to the fence that marked the beginning of her grandfather’s property. His fields and pastures. His apple orchard. And the tidy Canadian farmhouse that was never a home to him in the way that his barn workshop was—for it was in his workshop that he preserved Europe. To enter this cluttered space was to taste, for just a moment, the flavour of everything he had lost. Markets and cathedrals, medieval cities whose spires stood like a bouquet on the horizon, and rivers over which arched bridges of such beauty that the old man’s eyes filled with tears whenever he described them.

Klara stood in the doorway of the barn and watched as her grandfather worked. Everything about him was hunched and crooked from years of bending over various kinds of labour. The gristmill, the farm, and always this carving. He was bowed toward a relief panel with reverential affection, chisel and hammer in hand. As long as Klara could remember, her grandfather’s fingers had been twisted and arthritic. And yet his hands were large and strong, with veins and sinews like a net of ropes rising from the skin. And his gestures, when touching wood or making a conversational point, were tender yet assured. He turned from his work, to look at his granddaughter, and his face lifted into multiple creases, as if the drapery of his many carved saints, prophets, apostles, and evangelists had taken up residence on his supple skin.

As Klara entered the barn, a lamb lying near the work table scrambled to its feet and cantered out into the yard. “Now look what you’ve done,” said her grandfather, but not unkindly. “It took me all morning to coax the little devil in here.”

“Was he a model?” Klara asked.

“That too,” said her grandfather, “but also I was keeping him from your grandmother’s spirea bushes. One more bite and we would be having him for dinner Sunday night.” He began to clean the chisel he held in his hand with a cloth. “How is your abbess?” he asked. “Have you finished her yet?”

Klara did not answer but crouched down instead to look at her grandfather’s latest carving. He had completed more than half of the spokes of radiance that emanated from the relief of the holy lamb’s body. The floor around the piece was littered with spirals of paper-thin wood. “No,” said Klara, still examining the piece, “I’ve had tailoring to do.”

“ ‘It were noble occupation for ingenious youths without employment to exercise themselves in this art.’ It was Dürer who said it.”

Klara rose and crossed the floor to a small, partly finished altarpiece. She used her skirt to polish the hat of one of the figures where sawdust had gathered around the rim. She could not see how the statement applied to her—a wood sculptor, and a woman. Her grandfather, however, loved to tell how the year Tilman was born a book of Dürer’s writings became available through a university in England, and how he had travelled all the way to Toronto to purchase it. It had contained, among other things, instructions from the great master on how a boy might be raised toward becoming the maker of “great, far reaching, and infinite art.” This was seen as a highly auspicious sign by their grandfather and, after Tilman’s birth, he lectured his daughter-in-law mercilessly on the subject. It was suggested that “the child be kept eager to learn and not vexed” and “that he dwell in a pleasant house so that he be distracted by no manner of hindrance.” Dürer had never been mentioned in relation to Klara’s upbringing and this had not gone unnoticed by her. But, in truth, a few years after Tilman’s disappearance, her father had forbidden any reference to the book in his house, knowing that each time the grandfather quoted from it, the boy’s absence became more palpable, and his wife more vengeful. Once, after the book had been brought out, Klara’s mother turned to her twelve-year-old daughter with madness in her eyes and whispered, “Why are
you
still here? Why don’t you run away?” The grandfather had snapped the book shut then and had taken Klara by the hand out of the house to his own farm, where she stayed for several weeks under the care of her quiet grandmother. Everything in her had wanted to go home, believing that by staying with her grandparents she
had
run away, that she had proved her mother right. But her grandfather would not relent, and as neither parent came to fetch her, she began to believe that all of the adults surrounding her were complicitous, wanted her somehow to be gone.