The Stone Carvers (21 page)

The men always assumed he was an escaped Barnardo boy, one of hundreds of orphans sent from England to Ontario farms to work as hired hands. Tilman had found it best never to argue with an adult opinion of his condition, having learned during his time on the road that it was always safer to have an explanation for what one policeman had called “chronic vagrancy.” Sometimes farmers offered him work in apple orchards or hay fields, and Tilman would keep the resulting coins in a handkerchief he had stolen years before from his sister’s dresser drawer because of its flying birds pattern.

But he wouldn’t stay long—never more than a week—preferring to move from orchard to orchard and in the summer and autumn refusing any employment that did not include a view of the lake. During high summer he picked strawberries with large crowds of migrant workers, content with his anonymity in the throng. He loved these mornings, dew silvering the low plants, stars of sunlight on the lake. And in the evenings, swimming in the lake washed the sweat from his skin and all the winter anxiety from his mind. He was content in the knowledge that he was connected with nothing, no one, that neither his presence nor his absence counted for so much that he or anyone else needed to be dependent upon it. The days moved by with the fluidity of a silk scarf drawn through a ring. No work in a field or a pasture was onerous to him; nothing compared with the panic and exhaustion he felt when scrambling for food and warmth and shelter in the winter.

He had been—so far—a road tramp, a child of farms and villages. In the winter he put himself up for any kind of adoption, and had been taken in by pastors and matrons, bankers and thieves, or under the wing of a series of adult tramps who taught him how to look forlorn, and how to beg, and had taken more than half of the profits for themselves.

In his sixth autumn on the road he had stayed so long in the tomato belt in Essex County that the geese were mostly gone from the shores of Lake Erie, and the lake had become too cold for him to venture into. Banners of shimmering gold leaves were streaming past the brick houses where he begged his meals, and the barns were full to overflowing with a successful harvest. One crisp morning a farmer asked him to stack the firewood an older tramp was splitting, offering him twenty-five cents, a meal, and a cot in the barn in return. He showed Tilman a wheelbarrow. “Take all that wood the Italian’s split and put it in the barn. Mind it’s neatly stacked.” Tilman looked across the lane to the edge of the pasture where an olive-skinned man with curly grey hair was working like a tightly wound machine, his axe flashing in the sun, dark stains under his arms, though the day was cool.

“He’s a queer one,” the farmer remarked, “but one hell of a worker.”

Tilman made two or three trips to the shed before the man chopping wood spoke to him.

“I’m not chopping wood,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone I’m chopping wood.” He balanced a large piece of oak on the stump in front of him, lifted the axe high over his head, held the pose for a second or two, then slammed the axe into the flesh of the wood, splitting it into four equal pieces. “I didn’t come down here to find Italians,” he said. “I’m not Italian. There are no Italians in Leamington. I haven’t been picking tomatoes.”

“I seen lots of Italians picking tomatoes,” said Tilman, “and lots what own the farms they’re grown on.”

“You must never tell anyone that,” said the man, repositioning a log that had fallen from the stump. “And don’t tell anyone that I told you not to tell.”

Tilman had met many hobos on the road who were running from one thing or another: wives, children, the law. “I won’t tell nobody nothing,” he said. “What’s your name? Mine’s Tilman.”

“Your name is not Tilman,” said the Italian, making instant kindling out of another log. “It’s not Tilman any more than mine is Refuto.”

Tilman thought about this while he hauled a loaded wheelbarrow to the shed. By the time he returned, the man was sitting on the stump, wiping his face with a dirty cloth and drinking water from a pail. He rinsed his mouth and spat on the ground.

Tilman shook his head. “I think your name is Refuto, ‘cause mine is surely Tilman.”

“Who wants to know?” asked the Italian suspiciously. “And why?”

“Nobody wants to know except me.”

“I didn’t ask who wanted to know. I’m not chopping any more wood.” Suddenly the man’s eyes went as blank as the ones Tilman remembered from his grandfather’s wooden statues. He remained utterly still, unbreathing, for two or three minutes. Then he inhaled deeply, his eyes snapped back into focus, he leapt to his feet, grabbed the axe, and attacked another piece of wood.

“Not … one … Italian … working … here … chopping … wood!” he shouted. “Not … one!”

Tilman threw two pieces of split wood into the pile. “You look like one Italian to me,” he said quietly.

“Who told you that?”

“No one.”

The man rested his axe on the stump and stared into space. “This boy,” he said, “did not say, ‘No one’.”

Tilman picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and marched off toward the shed. When he came back he addressed the man by name. “Refuto,” he began.

“No,” said Refuto, “my name is not Refuto. Who told you my name was Refuto?”

“You did.”

“I did not.”

“Well, you told me your name
wasn’t
Refuto, which made me think more ‘n likely it was.”

Refuto selected a piece of cedar from the pile. The energy seemed to have leaked out of his argument, but still he looked suspiciously from side to side. “Just don’t tell anybody,” he said.

“Refuto,” Tilman began again.

“No,” said Refuto.

“Refuto, are you crazy?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Are you starvin’?” Tilman had seen older hobos hallucinate and start to rave when they had gone without food for a long time … or when they were suddenly without alcohol.

“Not starving,” said Refuto.

“What’s the matter with you then?”

“You didn’t ask that.”

“Aw, c’mon, I did so.”

Tilman was feeling irritation, a barely remembered sensation, one he had not experienced so far on the road. Almost all the other sentiments and passions had visited him: fear, affection, happiness, agitation, excitement, very occasionally boredom—but not since his parents had sent him to school had he felt irritation. He pushed the wheelbarrow over to the growing pile of wood. Refuto’s axe whistled through the air, then smashed through wood over and over, as if the man were an oversized mechanical toy. Tilman noticed Refuto was shaped almost exactly like a bear.

“You sure can split wood,” said Tilman. “So you don’t have anything the matter with your arms.”

“What arms?” said Refuto. “Who says I got arms?”

Tilman sighed and trudged back to the shed with a full load. “I’m not hauling wood to the shed,” he called over his shoulder. Then he laughed and picked up his pace. Behind his back he could hear Refuto laughing too. By evening they were the best of friends.

The day, much like the days Tilman’s grandfather had experienced half a century before, had been one devoted to wood: hardwood, softwood, cordwood, kindling. At one point Refuto called out to Tilman, “This isn’t beautiful basswood some fool has me chopping for his fire,” and the word “basswood” made something in Tilman’s memory twitch and jump.

His grandfather’s workshop. The distant landscapes he had made on a flat, golden-brown plane by cutting into the wood pictures of the smallest trees and hills and pastures anyone could imagine. He remembered the pleasure of it, the pleasure and the pride. He dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. “Did you say basswood?”

“No, I did not say basswood. Who wants to know?”

“Let me see it,” said Tilman.

“Jesus, look out for the axe.”

It was basswood all right, Tilman recognized it from his childhood. He remembered his grandfather telling him how the great sculptors of Riemenschneider’s time had been required to apply for its European cousin, limewood, one tree at a time, from the controlled forests surrounding towns such as Nuremburg and Ulm, how sometimes during times of scarcity, they had dropped to their knees in front of the municipal authorities and begged and wept. Limewood. Basswood. His grandfather said they were almost the same, though not quite, basswood being somewhat inferior. Tilman, carrying a full load of this material into the farmer’s shed, recalled that his grandfather could read wood, was able to determine from the grain how a piece might crack or warp as the moisture departed from it, where the flesh of it might glow when it was rounded, glazed, and rubbed, and how it would catch the light when coaxed into a particular shape. The old man had taken the boy outside one winter night and had pointed to a barely discernible cluster of stars in an otherwise vibrant sky.
“Caela Sculptoris,”
he had said. “Our own constellation—the carver’s tool. Not the brightest but still placed in the sky by God to honour a humble profession.” Tilman had not looked for it since. Tonight, he thought, I’ll look for it tonight.

But in the evening the wind that had all day long thrown the last of the yellow leaves into the lake began to push dark clouds in from the west, and Tilman and Refuto went early to their bunks in a small barn filled with the racket that rain makes on a tin roof. While Refuto muttered to himself about all the plans he didn’t have for tomorrow, Tilman began to carve—with a broken-handled knife—a faraway forest on a flat piece of basswood he had rescued from the shed.

The knife, which he had carried all over Ontario with him in a burlap bag, was much too dull and unsuitable for the job at the best of times, but eventually a recognizable woodlot began to appear as a result of his efforts. When Tilman looked up from his pastime, he could see Refuto’s shadow huge on the opposite wall, cast there by the lantern the farmer had loaned them for the night. Tilman, who was much more fond of animals than he was of human beings, was pleased by the bear shape it made.

“There’s a bear in the stars,” he told Refuto, “as well as a carver’s tool.”

Refuto shook his head, presumably in disagreement.

“You chopped every bit of wood on the place,” Tilman ventured, “so there’ll be nothing for us to do tomorrow. Looks like we’ll be moving on.”

Seldom, in fact never did he take to anyone the way he had inexplicably taken to this impossible man.

“No, we won’t,” said Refuto.

“So where’ll we go?” Tilman continued. “It’s getting winter soon. We’ll have to go to some town.”

“Hrumph!” said Refuto, his most positive statement so far.

“I know some towns that are good,” said Tilman. “Chatham, Sarnia. Not too far. And good.”

“There are no towns,” said Refuto.

“There’s towns everywhere all over with women who’ll give a kid a supper. I’ve been in big brick houses. Once I lived a day in a mansion.”

Refuto sat silently on the edge of his cot and stared at Tilman while the boy scratched away at the wood and leaned forward to blow the shavings onto the floor. Once, when Tilman looked up, he saw there were tears in the tramp’s eyes. “I don’t have a son about your age,” Refuto said. “And this boy,” he added, leaving Tilman wondering exactly which boy he was referring to, “can’t he carve.”

It was Refuto who introduced Tilman to the world of the trains. More comfortable with silence than with speech, the older man proved to be an excellent teacher of movement. He showed Tilman the precise steps necessary to mount a moving boxcar, how to position oneself for comfort, camouflage, and safety when riding the rails, how to make and read the symbols that were always left by tramps on water towers near the railway stations.

This calligraphy, these pictures delighted Tilman. “You’re not supposed to have a picture all your own,” Refuto told him. His personal mark was three circles in the shape of a bearlike snowman with tight curls on the head and a cross intersecting the torso to indicate to all who might want to know that Refuto had never been there. Tilman created a drawing for himself that looked somewhat like a pennant in a strong wind, but which the boy knew was the shape the carver’s constellation made in the night sky. Refuto also demonstrated the correct approach to another hobo’s campfire: a skilfully balanced performance combining an air of deference with that of confidence. Head up, arms down, shoulders curved, faint, wistful smile. Many of the other tramps knew and liked Refuto, whom they greeted with lines such as “It’s
not
Refuto” or “Well, if it
isn’t
Refuto.” Some of them preferred to call him “Naysayer Nick.”

“What’s this Nick?” Tilman asked.

“My real name is not Nicolo Vigomanti. Refuto is not the name I got on the road.”

The man and the boy crossed the country twice, emerging from boxcars after long, rumbling sleeps in towns named after animal bones, flowering plants, glaciers, berries, Greek gods, or a bend in the river. They were thrown off the train twice in Saskatchewan, near Moosejaw on the way out and Touchwood on the way back. Tilman, who had remained unaffected by the Rocky Mountains beyond being disappointed somewhat that they did not resemble the hallway murals he remembered from his brief stays in large houses, was thrilled by the open expanse of the prairies, where he could see barns, grain elevators, farmhouses, and the onion domes of lonely wooden churches—all so far away that he knew they would never interfere with his enjoyment of them. He could see thunderstorms on the horizon that would never dampen his clothes. And by the time they were on their way back east, he could stand in the sun and watch snow squalls twenty miles away, for each night now was colder than the last.

Tilman continued to carve the piece of basswood he had taken from the farmer’s shed, often working in the thin slice of sunlight that entered by way of the partially open boxcar door. Refuto occasionally glanced at the boy’s handiwork but never commented. Still, Tilman’s constant energy seemed to activate something in the older man, some latent need for labour brought about by his tremendous strength and a realization that with winter would come long, empty days with only a kid and the cold for company. One day as they sat in the slanted light of a late November sun on a bench outside a rural train station, Refuto began to talk about employment.