The Stone Carvers (15 page)

“I’m up here,” she called back, only then thinking that he might have returned sooner, and that if he had he likely would not have been noticed. “Eamon has come for his coat.”

Eamon and Klara exchanged glances, embarrassed by an awareness of a possible discovery. Suddenly Klara was able to imagine the act as if she had been a witness rather than a participant, as if she had stood outside herself and watched the senseless awkwardness of their lovemaking. She felt that she had been ushered by Eamon into a heated adult world where men and women clutched at each other, wrestled, collapsed on the floor. Then the moment passed and they embraced, Eamon burying his face in the warmth of Klara’s neck.

But the outer world was not to be ignored. “Come down,” Dieter Becker was calling. “Come down and bring Silent Irish with you. There’s news. War has been declared.”

I
n June of 1869, when the second Corpus Christi procession had completed its one-mile tour of the church grounds, Father Archangel Gstir rose from the long makeshift table where he had been enjoying the baked goods of his female parishioners and gazed around the cleared acreage. He held up his hand to quiet the festive crowd gathered near him and then signalled to those of his flock seated on the flat round surfaces of stumps left behind after the trees for the log church were cut. When he was certain he had everyone’s attention, he bent down and, with some difficulty, lifted a wooden box from the ground. He turned his back on the crowd, placed his burden on the seat of the chair he had just vacated, and, swivelling back and forth, began to place on the table, one after another, the twenty iron railway spikes that had been brought to him the previous day by a tinker who worked the roads of the surrounding territory.

“These,” Father Gstir announced, “are the beginnings of our great stone church.”

Mill workers and farmers then rose from their own chairs and walked around the perimeter of the little log church, pacing out the enlarged dimensions of the imagined stone foundation. Father Gstir paced with them, pausing every now and then to hammer a spike into the ground. When this task was completed, he returned to his box and removed from it loop after loop of red ribbon, one end of which he tied to the stake nearest the spot where the front doors would eventually open to the congregation. Then, slipping the ribbon through his fingers as he walked, looking for all the world as if he were about to take part in a May Day celebration, he tied the ribbon in knots around the heads of all twenty iron spikes.

That spring enough fieldstones had surfaced under the ploughs of the farmers to make an adequate start at the foundation. The bishop was summoned, the cornerstone was laid and blessed, and oxen, horses, and a team of thirty volunteers provided the labour. By September, the resulting rectangular structure, sixty feet wide, looked as if it were an uncommonly large garden wall enclosing the yard of the log church. Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace blossomed around its base; squirrels occasionally ran along its top. Work begun the following spring increased the height of the structure to such an extent that only the braver children were tempted to shinny up the stone walls.

How long the construction seemed to take! Despite donations of limestone from newly discovered local quarries, and lime from local kilns and sand from local pits, and many thousands of feet of hewn timber from local lots, money was still needed for the sandstone buttresses and the hundreds of running feet of lintels. Sometimes during the miserable winters that inevitably followed the industrious summers and autumns of this period, when snow threatened to completely bury the limestone walls, Father Gstir would almost give up hope. Then, on a clear day in February or March, a messenger would be seen climbing the white road from the village, a brown envelope sealed with wine-coloured wax in his hand, and another two or three thousand thalers would be added to the fund.

One of the largest of these spontaneous donations appeared during the bitterly cold winter of 1880. Father Gstir, in a letter of effusive thanks to the Ludwig Missions-Verig and to the royal benefactor, described the skeins of snow blowing against the limestone walls and through the empty Gothic windows.
Like angels
, he wrote,
these trailing white clouds look to me like angels visiting our church
. By the end of summer, he predicted, we will have a roof, now that there is money for the slates. He apologized for the lack of polar bears, which, he claimed, had moved farther north because of the increasing population of the village.

In early August of that year dozens of healthy young men—men who in Europe would have made fine soldiers—gathered at the site of the church and ascended a multitude of ladders. In the space of a month, working in the evenings after a full day of agricultural labour, they had completely slated the roof. Each night, when darkness fell, they descended to earth, walked down the hill to Schmidt’s Creek, and threw off their clothes in order to bathe. Everyone in the village could hear the sound of their laughter through open summer windows.

The same group of young men came to the church grounds in late September. Under the shelter of the soaring timbered and slated roof, by the light shining through newly installed window glass, they began, quite carefully, to dismantle the small structure that had until that very moment served as the community’s place of worship. Then they took that structure, log by log, out the front door of the new stone church, leaving the planked floor, the pine pews, and an altar carved by Joseph Becker surrounded by a margin of bright green indoor grass. The work took all day and was eventually completed by the light of the harvest moon.

Father Gstir, who presided over the project, was most moved by this last act of labour connected to the building of his church, moved by the solemn expressions on the faces of the men as they carried the past through the doors of the future, how they stacked the timber so tidily in the northeast corner of the lot, where it would not interfere with anyone’s view of the present. It seemed to him as if he were watching time itself being carried in the arms of youth, and as if the pile of logs being assembled in the moonlight was a kind of monument that both celebrated and mourned the receding past.

No one in Shoneval wanted to enlist. This reluctance would be later attributed to the German background of the village by a simplistic but effective propaganda machine designed to make people in Canada increasingly aware of racial and ethnic differences. The truth was that nobody wanted to enlist because they had spent the Sunday afternoons of their childhoods listening to grandparents count their blessings—the most important of which was freedom from armed conflict. Large portions of the elder population had left behind war-torn Bavaria in their youth precisely for this reason. Even more had left behind the constant deadly squabbles over Alsace. They had not abandoned ancestral homelands, endured the misery of a pitching ship, battled armies of trees and insects, watched their spouses and children die wretchedly and far too soon only to see their grandchildren return to the battlegrounds from which they had fled. In Shoneval, news of the outbreak of war was publicly discussed for one day, and since that day was Sunday, Father Gallagher preached a pointed sermon on the first commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Afterwards everybody descended the hill to the customary tankard that was always enjoyed at the Archangel Tavern each Sunday after mass.

And yet one young man with a red waistcoat far too warm for the season had seen something in a back field just a month ago, something that would turn his mind toward the conflict and determine his fate. No visitation of the Blessed Virgin, no choir of angels, no vision of the Infant of Prague could have moved him more than the shuddering, noisy machine that had descended unceremoniously into his life.

A few weeks after the news reached Shoneval, Eamon told Klara that he felt compelled to go, “and who knows,” he added, “if I go they might let me fly an aeroplane … they will be crucial from now on in any war. Then when I come back I’ll keep one in the barn.”

Klara’s response was one of sudden, cold fear. How could he step away from her now, place an ocean between them, put himself and their love at risk, and all for the love of an airborne toy? Since their encounter in the sunroom, Eamon had visited her nightly, entering her room by way of the chestnut tree that grew near the window, then slipping into her bed, her arms. His body was her body now; she barely knew where his anatomy ended and hers began. She had learned the whole geography of his bones and flesh, the taut ropes of tendons at his ankles and behind his knees, veins branching from his crotch to his upper thighs, his firm, smooth upper arms, and sharp hip and shin bones. She knew how to curl into the hollows of his adjacent torso, how to entangle her legs with his when she was stretched out at his side. What made him want to remove this physical warmth, this rapture and comfort from her? In the heat of these summer nights often they were so tightly connected by sweat that when he rose to leave he would break the seal their damp skin had made. Was it possible that he who had coaxed her into this trance of intimacy would now shatter it all?

In his own kitchen Eamon’s Irish father told him that no son of his was going off to fight for England, and that if he chose to do so he would be a son of his no more.

When Eamon reported this to Klara on an August day thick with heat—when he told her this in an outraged voice, certain of the injustice, courting her sympathy—she crossed the kitchen and slapped his face with such violence that tears sprang into his eyes. “You’re a fool, Eamon O’Sullivan,” she hissed. “A fool and an infant. I want nothing more to do with you.”

She had opened, had given too much of herself to him. Now all of his decisions wounded her. She watched as the shape her blow had made appeared on his shocked face, the way the anger entered his expression. After the screen door banged behind him, Klara went out to her workshop, bolted the door, and worked on the abbess for the remainder of the afternoon, sharpening her tools to make the woman’s features and the folds of her garments angular and determined. She ignored her father’s fist on the door, and his pleas for dinner. She ignored her visiting grandfather’s entreaties. When she finally emerged into moonlight and heat, even the trees and buildings seemed to shrink under the angry grief of her gaze. As she climbed the stairs to her room she felt the temperature rise. These were the dog days of August, the day’s heat never left the upper floors of the house, pushed back any relief that wanted to enter by way of breezes through open windows. Klara undressed, fell face down on the bed, and remembered with sorrow that just a week before, Eamon’s sleeping face had rested in the hollow of the same hand that had just struck him.

And yet when she was awakened an hour later by the sound of a carefully lifted window, the sense that she had been betrayed by him returned and she quickly covered herself with the sheet and told him to leave.

“For God’s sake, Klara.” There was fear now on his always readable face. He held out his arms to her.

“Don’t,” she whispered, her knees drawn up, her face hidden on the sheet that was covering her arms and shoulders.

During the preceding weeks she had been delighted by his spontaneous nocturnal appearances, the hint of danger, the melting pleasure she could never associate with sordidness or sin. Now she could imagine that after his departure, shame would enter the emptiness he left behind.

“We’ll get married,” he said, “before I leave.”

He had thought it was that.

She looked up at him, astonished. After this mutiny, this certainty of chosen absence, marriage seemed impossible to her. How could he not know that? Moths were now coming into her room, flying toward her lit lamp. “Close the window, Eamon,” she said.

He believed this meant she wanted him to stay. He let down the sash quietly, not wanting to waken, to alert her father. Then he crossed the floor and sat near her on the bed.

A moth had landed on her cheek, but she did not wish to expose even her bare arms to Eamon, so she kept the sheet wrapped tightly around her torso like a shawl, like a shroud. He leaned forward and gently caught the insect in his cupped hands, then quietly opened the door and released it out into the hall. When he walked back to the bed, she turned her face away from him.

She should never have trusted her own passion, this animal that paced around the edges of her character. She was right to have been wary in the beginning, suspicious of the sound of its first unrecognized footstep. Now she believed that ever since that moment she had known that she would be somehow betrayed by it—even when it had felt like a light, almost transparent being, sensitive to every nuance and current of connection with this young man. But now it had become a heavy brute, tenebrous, unmovable, weighted by dread. This dark removal, this adventure in absence, chosen by him. She almost hated him for the pain its anticipation brought her. Reaching for a box on the table by her bedside, she opened it and pulled tight the amber necklace she kept there, snapping the string, beads spilling across the sheets and bouncing on the floor.

Eamon had given her this gift. “I don’t want this any more,” she said quietly.

The bruised, wounded look that came over his face would be recorded by Klara’s mind and would be carried there for years to come. The string of bright beads, he had told her, were to remind her of the twenty brightest days they had spent together, and a promise of twenty more, and then twenty more, infinitely. Even in old age she would be able to call to mind the sound of the word “infinitely,” the music it had made, coloured by the slight Irish accent in his mouth—a word that whether shouted, sung, or spoken sounded always like a tender whisper. When she broke the beads, she had been throwing all the bright days away.

But now, as Klara shifted and one final amber bead clattered on the wood floor, Eamon stood before her, his face flushed, his shoulders hunched, as if cringing in the wake of a physical attack. Then he had straightened and stood briefly, powerfully, above her in the room. “I can only hope,” he said as he moved toward the window, “that you’ll love me better when I get back.”