The Stone Carvers (25 page)

“What Mother did …” Klara touched her brother’s arm.

“It wasn’t that I was afraid of that, I just hadn’t forgotten it. I remembered everything about that time, about them doing that to me.” Tilman looked out the window, past the reflected kitchen and deep into the September night, silently recalling his distant imprisonment. “Why did Father let her do it? Why didn’t he just stop her?”

There was nothing that Klara could say that would answer this question. “He spoke of you, you know, when he was dying,” she said.

Tilman settled back in the chair, his expression softening somewhat. “But he was part of it … he agreed to it. I think he even put the harness on me.”

“I don’t know,” said Klara. “But he was filled with regret. It was obvious he was always filled with regret.”

Both were silent for several moments. Then Klara asked Tilman how he managed to survive with his wooden leg.

“I was used to it by the time they closed the factory; I got around pretty good. But I couldn’t do the trains any more. So I hitchhiked. The army jacket helped. And the medals.”

“You won medals!” said Klara, preparing to be proud.

“Only one, for some supposed enemy activity I spotted while on sentry duty. But one of the fellows I worked with in the factory was so disgusted with everything—the war, the stupid legs, he threw his own medal in the trash. I fished it out later, figuring it might come in handy. You use everything you can on the road,” he said. “It’s part of what we hobos call our professional code.”

Klara lifted her hands, dripping, from the bowl, stood, and crossed the room to a linen towel that hung near the stove.

“The Kitchen Queen,” announced Tilman, not looking in the direction of the cumbersome iron contraption.

Klara laughed. “The stove,” she said. “Did you remember it?”

“Not really,” Tilman twisted around to examine it, “but I worked in a stove factory for a while.”

“There can’t be many of those left. Most people have gone to electric now.”

“True,” said Tilman. “I know a whole family put out of work by that.”

She gave him their parents’ bed, believing that his childhood room would hold too many ghosts for him. She did not ask how long he intended to stay and knew instinctively he had not come back for the farm, despite the enthusiasm—perhaps feigned—that he showed concerning Charolais and Charlotta and his praise of her success with them.

“Do you remember this?” she kept asking the next day. “Do you remember?” She touched object after object in the house as if bringing them to his attention might make their shared childhood come into focus for her, if not for him.

“The curtains!” he exclaimed, glancing into the room that had once been his and later belonged to his grandfather. “I remember the curtains! I hated them closed, even at night.” He looked at Klara and smiled. “Needed to see the view.”

“Needed to get out the window, you mean.”

“Sometimes.”

He clomped behind her obediently from room to room and then down the stairs to the parlour. Most of their grandfather’s woodcarvings had been commissioned by the church, and now they stood in various religious institutions in the south and west of Ontario. But a few modest figures, a Saint John the Baptist and a Saint Jerome, complete with writing desk and sleeping lion, were kept in this room.

“How did he die?” Tilman asked.

Klara glanced at her brother’s face, which had the strained look of someone trying to remember a person they had lost long ago. “In his sleep,” she said softly. “He just sort of wore out.”

“Good, I’m glad he died like that. I remember him …” Tilman stroked the polished drapery hanging from the baptist’s arm. “I remember him with fondness. I was sometimes happy in his workshop.”

“He lived here after grandmother died. So he worked in the woodshed.” Klara paused, “It wasn’t quite the same. Would you want the tools, perhaps? He always thought …”

“I don’t know about that,” Tilman frowned slightly. “Tools stay in one place and …”

“Did you never carve again? He always kept one scene you had done.” Klara did not tell her brother about the small boy that had appeared in every group of figures the old man carved. “He was always waiting for you to come back.”

“I carved,” said Tilman, “here and there. In the stoveworks I carved the pattern moulds for the decorative work.”

Later in the afternoon, Klara took Tilman upstairs to the sunroom, her own bright tailoring shop. He stood in the doorway. “Mother’s sewing room,” he said. “I remember this too.”

“It’s been mine now for more than twenty years.”

“So she died as soon as that then.” Tilman’s face underwent a change as the soft line of his mouth hardened.

“Yes.”

“And it was because of me. I always believed I would be responsible for her death, one way or another.”

“She died of a tumour,” said Klara matter-of-factly. “You couldn’t have done that. But she felt your loss terribly, and father said she never stopped feeling it.”

“He talked about me?” Tilman sounded pleased, but there was still a tightness about his expression.

“For a while. Then he stopped. The way you do with a dead person.”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“How were we to know that?” Klara looked away, unable to keep a brief twist of anger from showing on her face. “You could have at least let someone know you were all right,” she said.

Tilman walked into the room and leaned against the sewing table, his wooden leg straight out in front of him. “It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them—or you either—I just couldn’t come back at first, and then not coming back became a habit. Not coming back to anything … ever.”

“Why now … what brought you back now?” Klara was staring out the window at a horizon she had seldom visited, the limit of her own known territory.

Tilman said quietly, “The business wasn’t going so good in the past few years. And,” he added, a hint of shame in his voice, “I’d nowhere else.”

What business, Klara wanted to know. She’d heard nothing about a business.

Tilman scraped and clomped his way down the hall and returned with the sack Klara had seen him carrying when he first arrived. From it he pulled one wooden box, a rectangle eight inches long, six inches wide. On its surfaces were scenes carved in relief. Only the bottom was flat.

Klara picked it up and turned it slowly in her hands. She saw a prairie with several mountains behind it, a view across water with a tiny “V” of migrating birds on the left and a peninsula on the right, a bird’s-eye view of an industrial city, another plain with a freight train and grain elevators in the distance. The carving was detailed and skilful. “This is lovely,” she said, “and you didn’t even have a workshop.”

Tilman looked surprised. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never thought about needing a workshop.” He paused. “People buy them … for a dollar. Or bought them. But not so much now with times being hard.”

Klara continued to turn the box in her hands.

“I’ve done marble carving too. My friend Giorgio apprenticed with a man who made tombstones and he got me a job there. Giorgio is so good with marble he did all the angels in the graveyard and after the war he got interested in inscriptions. He tried to get me into lettercarving too, but I wasn’t keen on it. I liked carving roses and willows sometimes.” Tilman looked pensive. “But anyway I couldn’t stay, and you can’t take marble on the road. Giorgio could always settle into a job as if it would last forever, but when the hard times came, no one could pay for the angels any more. Last time I saw him he was living in some shack in the Don Valley in Toronto. Him and a hundred other men. He was a tramp, like me.” He smiled. “I told him I thought I’d never see the day …”

It was the first time Klara had heard Tilman use this term in relation to himself. Her father had used the word “tramp” with some disdain, but he had always given them something, a coin, some food, nevertheless.

“Giorgio’s an Italian name, right?” she said.

“Yes. His father was on the road with me when I was younger. But he was only a temporary ‘bo. So’s Giorgio. Only temporary. He’d got a job overseas, or he thought he’d get one, working on some Jesus huge Canadian war memorial that’s going to be built at Vimy, where I lost my leg in France. It’s been in the works for years. The sculptor, Allward—the man who got the commission—is such a fanatic that it took him forever to find the right stone, apparently. Then they had to build a road, clear the site,” Tilman walked over to the window. “That would have been a real treat,” he said bitterly, “sort of like clearing a charnel house.”

Klara could feel the nerves awaken in the skin of her back and neck. “Nobody from this place went to war,” she said. “They all took agricultural exemption.” She looked at the floor, not wanting Tilman to see her expression. “Nobody but one.”

“Two,” said Tilman. “I sure as hell went to war.”

“Sorry.” Klara began tidying her work table in the uncomfortable silence that ensued. Scissors to the left, patterns to the right.

“Could you use this?” Tilman asked, his voice softening. He pulled a slightly larger carved box from the sack. “Maybe for thread or something.”

As Klara took the box in her hands she could feel tears entering her eyes. It had been years since anyone had given her a gift. “Thank you, Tilman,” she said, turning the box on the table, keeping her eyes on it, embarrassed by her emotion. “Why didn’t you go?” she asked quietly now, not looking at him, her fingers moving over the texture of the various landscapes. “Why didn’t you go to this Canadian memorial?” There was a tiny bridge, very far away, on the part of the box she was looking at. “I would have gone.”

“Why on earth would I ever want to go back there, Klara? I couldn’t begin to tell you what hell it was. Think of this: Giorgio said it took five years to remove enough mines from the ground so that it was safe to begin construction. And even so, someone is blown up every few months. This Allward, the sculptor in charge, must be a nightmare to work for. He’s had the commission for ten years and only now is he able to hire the carvers.”

Klara was dropping spools of brightly coloured thread into the box he had given her.

“There’s going to be names engraved on it, which is why Giorgio is so interested,” Tilman continued. “But only the names of the eleven thousand who went missing in action in France. Giorgio wanted me to go because he said my leg went missing in action.” Tilman laughed then but did not look at his sister, expecting her not to share the humour.

Klara was holding a spool of thread in her hand. “Missing in action,” she repeated.

“Yes, you know, the ones they never found, probably because they were blown to bits. We found some—but only parts—nobody could tell if they were Brits or Germans or even what colour their hair had been.”

Klara dropped the thread in the box and slammed down the lid. Tilman, startled, jumped up and faced her. Then his eyes narrowed. “You have no idea how awful it was. Nobody has any idea.”

“Don’t tell me,” Klara said. “Please, just don’t talk about it.”

“No,” said Tilman, “you wouldn’t want to know. No one does.” He turned his back and hobbled over to the door. “No one over here wants to know anything about it.”

T
he next morning Tilman was up early. Klara could hear him below making the fire, the stove doors clanking and the sound of water flowing into the kitchen sink. It had been a long time since anyone other than she had made these morning noises, and she allowed herself the luxury of listening to another prepare to meet the day.

She had slept late. For hours, long into the night, the man Allward and his memorial had been in her mind, and she lay on her back and whispered the name to herself over and over, terrified that she might forget it. Very early in the morning she had sunk into sleep, and she had dreamt of Eamon for the first time in years, a tender dream in which he had whispered the words “Now you can love me” as they lay together, skin to skin, in the very bed where she slept. “Now you can say it, Klara,” he breathed the sentence into her ear. “Now you can say you love me.” In the dream she thought it must have always been like this, and happiness touched all of her like heavy rain. She could smell his skin and feel his lips brush her face. “You are filled with joy,” he told her. She woke refreshed, as if her mind had been rinsed clear by bright water.

In the kitchen Tilman offered her tea, but she touched his arm and told him she had something to show him. He asked if she could wait until after breakfast, but she said no, she had waited long enough.

As they passed through the woodshed Tilman put his hand on the door jamb to which he had been chained so many years ago. Klara, walking ahead of him, stepped into the long, dewy grass of the yard. “No one scythes it any more,” she explained. “Sometimes I tether a calf here to keep it down.”

Tilman didn’t respond.

“Sorry,” she said, remembering.

Her shoes were drenched when they reached the lane that led to the shop. She stopped there to allow Tilman to catch up and noticed as he swung his leg toward her that the moisture had glued his pant leg to the surface of his artificial limb. How altered we are, she thought, how changed. But now the difference seemed wonderful, miraculous, for she knew that there was something else they recognized in each other, something cellular and deep that made all the muscle and skin of their external selves seem constructed, like Tilman’s false leg.

“Do you ever wonder,” she said quietly, “how it would be for us if things had gone the way they should?”

Tilman stopped walking and looked far off to the point where he could see one concession road intersecting another. “Things did go the way they should,” he said, “for me.”

How had it been for him, she wondered, moving away from the familiar and with all those impediments, a chain at first and the awful vulnerability of being an unprotected child in a world full of strangers. Then the war, and now this cumbersome prosthesis.

She guided Tilman over to the old workshop, handed him the hammer she had brought with her, and watched as he struggled to free the bolt that had been welded by rust to the rungs that surrounded it. A voyage to Vimy was unthinkable, farther than she could imagine. Yet, since the moment her brother had mentioned the monument she had felt as if the urge to cross the Atlantic had always been a part of her life, even as if she were familiar with the journey. Perhaps she had always wanted to go, always wanted to walk out the back door and know she was leaving an entire way of life behind, to see if there was another point of view, another narrative waiting for her in a landscape she hadn’t yet experienced. But her brother’s absence, and Eamon’s dematerialization, seemed to have used up all the energy necessary to move forward, to keep going rather than turn back. It could be that Tilman’s return brought with it the animation she had always believed she lacked. She looked at the sky and then at the pasture beneath it. The white animals in the field looked unreal to her now, like discarded phantoms, as if they had already been left behind. Or as if they belonged to someone else.