The Stone Carvers (24 page)

Klara could manage the maintenance of only the first row of trees in what had been a substantial apple orchard when her father was actively running the farm. But, even so, the other trees—though twisted and wild and bearing only puny, worm-ridden apples—still blossomed splendidly along with their pruned and plucked cousins, adding a pleasing balance on one side of the house to the field of white cows, calves, and one bull who grazed on the other. In the autumn Klara faithfully harvested all of the apples from the four well-kept trees, giving some as treats to the animals and hauling the rest by a wagon attached to her very old horse to the cider mill near the brewery.

It was a late afternoon in September of 1934, while she was perched dangerously close to the top of the pointed ladder with one hand grasping a perfectly round McIntosh apple, that Klara spotted a stranger with a pack on his back, limping slowly up the long lane that led to the house. Tramps had begged at her door before and she had always given them something. Today it would be apples and whatever other scraps of food she had lying about. She sighed, let go of the apple she was holding, and began to descend the ladder. But on the third step she stopped. There was something she had recognized in the shape of this man’s head and, even from this distance, in the placement of his ears and eyebrows. She stood entirely still and gazed at her hands, which were wrapped around the grey wood of the ladder, then unconsciously lifted one of them to smooth her hair, for the first time in over a decade becoming aware of what she had become, of how she would appear if the man in the lane turned out to be Eamon. He was making painfully slow progress, swinging his right leg stiffly forward before permitting the left to join it, but with each step the spark of recognition was fanned toward flame in Klara’s mind. She experienced terror then: pure, cold, and immobilizing. It took an unimaginable strength of will for her to climb again two rungs of the ladder in order to be concealed by the leaves of the tree, leaves that she noticed had begun to twitch in a sudden shift of wind.

Klara stood on the ladder and tried to remember the appearance of the woman to whom she spoke each day in the mirror, but she could call up only an uncertain image of tidy hair. The man had entered the yard now and was lurching toward the back door. Without a fraction of hesitation he lifted the latch, hauled his bad leg over the threshold, and disappeared inside. Klara recalled evenings two decades past when Eamon had sat sullenly in the kitchen. If it were him, would he choose the same chair?

Sometime later she came back to herself and found that she was standing perfectly still on a ladder, hiding in a tree, and she felt infantile, stupid. Her insteps ached and there was a sliver in her palm that had lodged there when she had slid her hands too quickly up the side of the ladder in her panic. Dusk was falling, and she was trembling slightly. The chill in the air was causing this, she decided, her old practicality returning. Klara thought about the man who had sauntered casually through her door as if he were a family pet. What could this possibly mean, this assumed right of passage? She quickly descended the ladder and began to march toward the house. Inside, the vaguely familiar stranger was sitting at the table eating bread and cheese.

He was not Eamon.

He was not Eamon. Grief rushed at Klara like an avalanche, as if someone had seized her from behind and had suddenly thrust her head into coldness and darkness. She was physically assaulted by it. There was no breath remaining in her body.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the man, his eyes a mirror of her own. “Is it Klara?”

Not taking her eyes off the stranger she sat down slowly, unable at the moment to answer even the most simple question about her identity. Her self had slipped out of her body and was floating somewhere above the long grass she could see from her window. Black-and-white images of the carnage of the war from her father’s newspapers were passing swiftly through her mind, as if she had been a country senselessly invaded—passing through her mind though she had no memory at all of ever looking at these pictures. She stood up and then sat down again, became aware of the stranger’s face looking at her with concern and slowly, like oxygen returning to the bloodstream of one who has almost been strangled, she began to re-inhabit the room. But she knew she would never recover. This man was not Eamon. Eamon was dead.

The man had crossed the room now and had put his hand on her arm, was bending toward her and looking with confusion into her face. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said. And then again, “You are Klara, aren’t you?” He was so close to her she could feel his warm breath and smell his sweat.

Klara did not answer.

“Oh God,” said the man, turning his face away, “how could I have expected anyone to know me. I’m Tilman. I lived here as a child. Is it still the Becker place?”

Klara stared at him, a look of such profound shock on her face it was as if the man had slapped her. She stood up suddenly, took his shoulders in her hands, and pushed him roughly back, causing him to stagger awkwardly against the old pine table.

Then Klara flew at her brother with her fists.

Tilman stood still and received the blows. She attacked his arms and chest. He stopped her only when she began to kick, fearing she might injure herself when her foot met his wooden leg.

That evening, while an exhausted Klara soaked her bruised hands in a bowl of cool water, the brother and sister sat at the table and talked. Tilman explained little about where he had been before or after, but he did talk about the war, making reference to his artificial leg and telling her about the great battle in which he had participated until he was wounded out.

It was being fought on all levels, he told her, under the ground, on the surface, and in the air. It was the craziest thing, he said, pure bedlam. And the casualties were huge, overwhelming, though in the end the Canadians had taken the ridge. Afterwards hardly anyone who had participated and survived could remember anything about it, except chaos.

“Which battle was it?” Klara wanted to know.

“Vimy,” said her brother. “Vimy Ridge.”

W
hen Tilman returned from the war without his right leg, news had preceded him concerning his ability to work with wood. His sergeant, secretly impressed by the small, flat scenes the young man had worked on in the boggy trenches, had noted his talent on some form or another and this piece of paper had made its sluggish way through the network of military bureaucracy. After Vimy—the days and nights in the underground tunnels, the chaos of the battle, the grenade, the shattered leg and subsequent hurried and sloppy amputation—he had asked in the hospital, when he was finally able to talk, for limewood and a knife. “Quite a whittler!” a doctor had scribbled on an otherwise purely medical report, and that too had wended its way toward the governmental department that was being hastily assembled in the nation’s capital to deal with permanently damaged soldiers.

Thousands of wounded veterans were returning, many missing limbs. The government was in a state of mild panic. Various opinions were offered about what was to be done with these mutilated young men, the most common being that they should not be permitted to sink into shiftlessness, sloth, and self-pity. Eventually an otherwise dull and unpromising civil servant made a name for himself by suggesting that as most of the boys were still on crutches with one hollow pant leg blowing in the breeze, some of them at least might be gainfully employed making wooden legs for themselves and others like themselves in a factory designed for this purpose. A building that had been used until very recently in the manufacturing of wooden porch pillars, and was therefore splendidly outfitted with saws and lathes, was discovered in Toronto, inspected, thought to be just the ticket, and rapidly purchased by the department. It was much too large for the operation the government had in mind, but that problem was quickly solved by the same civil servant, who suggested the handicapped workers could be housed in dormitories above their place of employment. (No one had thought about how these young men were to get up and down the stairs, but that was a problem for another day.) When Tilman’s case came up, the two references to carving were met with great approval by the committee that had been formed to compile a list of suitable candidates. Tilman’s name went to the top of this list.

Tilman had hated the factory, hated the rigid legs and feet he worked on all day, and had utterly despised his own bogus limb. In the overcrowded and often panic-stricken hospitals at the Front, each sloppy amputation had been sloppy in a manner all its own. The result was that to each order that reached the workers was attached a complicated and in some cases unreadable set of measurements, which somehow would have to be transformed into a three-dimensional form. After a day filled with the problems of construction geometry, bad meals served in the adjacent cafeteria, and struggles with inadequately maintained machinery, the young men, Tilman included, would clump painfully up the stairs to the dormitory. Here at night Tilman’s dreams of burning his own wooden leg would be interrupted by the shouts of nightmare-ridden men who had not even begun to recover from the trauma of the war. Some of these same men could be heard crying themselves to sleep after lights out.

In many ways Tilman had been a model soldier. Used to sleeping in mud and rain, cooking meals in the open air, and by nature enjoying looking at things from a great distance, the army seemed to him to be just a slightly more dangerous variation on his tramping life. (Before and during Vimy he had often been a sentry, usually volunteering for the position, preferring the dangerous exposure to the congested camaraderie of the trench.) Even gross physical mutilation and death were no surprise to him as many tramps he had known had lost their limbs, or their lives, leaping into or being thrown out of moving boxcars—or by carelessness when riding the rods. But he was greatly disturbed by the unhappiness around him, by the meaningless slaughter of confused boys who were homesick in a way he had never been homesick, and he was repelled by the claustrophobic conditions of the trenches and the tunnels at Vimy. But even these dim passages seemed to be leading toward purpose and change, however misguided and misdirected. This factory, this pathetic attempt to patch up afterwards, this effort to reconstruct limbs and lives in a closed space was closer to hell than he had been since the chain. Had he the use of both legs, or even had his wooden leg caused him less discomfort, he would have bolted. As it was, he knew he could never survive his old life on the roads, so he stayed where he was, fed and housed and employed, gradually growing physically stronger, and tentatively entering, for the first time since the Vigamontis (and undoubtedly with some of the skills he had learned there), a community.

Like Tilman, most of the other men in the factory had nowhere else to go. Wives, girlfriends, in some cases even mothers and fathers had withdrawn in horror at their physical condition. If the men had worked in offices before the war, old employers had claimed they were not able to find a position for them. Physical labour was out of the question. Most of the men were too broken in spirit anyway to re-engage in anything that predated 1914, could hardly remember who they had been before the catastrophe, as if from now on they were to be stalled in a peculiar atmosphere of both stasis and transition. One former tramp commenting on his purgatorial life called himself a limb-bo rather than a hobo. The expression seemed a perfect moniker for the place in which they all lived and worked. Tilman carved an elaborate plaque with the name featured in large letters. It was hung on a wall at one end of the dormitory and was the first thing most of the men saw when they awakened in the morning.

After two years or so, Limb-Bo became a place of gradually declining activity, and in three years’ time the orders for artificial legs were down to a trickle. Not everyone in the country needed a prosthesis, apparently, and the war amputees had all been serviced. As hastily as the department had opened the factory, they now firmly closed it down. Satisfied that they had done all that they could to rehabilitate Tilman and his colleagues, the same government that had called these young men so earnestly to arms now cast them unceremoniously out into the streets.

All this was told to Klara as she and Tilman sat at the wide table in the kitchen after a meal of bacon, cabbage, potatoes, and applesauce. Only one small, dark stain had blossomed on the cheekbone under Tilman’s left eye, but Klara continued to soak her hands, having received the worst of it in a battle with only one side fighting.

“They’ll be all right tomorrow,” she replied when her brother asked repeatedly about her hands. She and Tilman had barely taken their eyes off each other, the need for knowledge was that great. Klara could see in Tilman’s face just vague traces of the flawless blond boy he had been, mostly in the clarity of his eyes that were still a piercing blue and in the shape of his mouth. The rest of his face had changed utterly, was rough, lined, and in places faintly scarred, though whether by battle or by the rigours of the road she couldn’t say. “What did you do,” she asked, “after the wooden legs?”

“I stayed in Toronto, begging on the streets and sleeping in the missions for a few years.” Tilman picked up his pine limb with both hands and moved it to a more comfortable position under the table. “It wasn’t any good, though, after the war. I wasn’t a kid any more, and there were so many vagrants in the city that people just became immune. Some of the boys pretended to be sick, or really got sick and went to the veterans hospital. Some of the country boys went home—if their families would have them. At least that way there was an address for the pension. I never had an address so there was no pension for me.”

“You could have come here.” Klara tried to imagine her father and her grandfather’s response to a wounded veteran returning from the war. A grown man with a hardened face and untidy brown hair, not a golden child.

“I wasn’t ready to. Even after the war, I wasn’t ready to.”