The Stone Carvers (6 page)

She turned finally, her hands glistening, drops of water clinging to the ends of her fingers. The room was dark in contrast to the brightness beyond the glass. Eamon was merely a featureless shape on a chair near the stove. Klara’s intention was to cross the room and leave by the woodshed door, leave him alone in the kitchen with his silence and his stubbornness, but she paused for a moment while her eyes adjusted to the shadows in the twilit room. After she had taken two or three steps, Eamon leaned forward and grasped her damp wrist.

This one simple touch freed the storm of speech that had been building in her mind for weeks, setting in motion a savage interrogation. She hurled the words—almost hysterically—into the air. “What do you want? What right do you have, what … what are you doing here, and why don’t you speak? What makes you think anyone wants you to come here?”

He was still holding on to her wrist. He said nothing.

Klara looked at his hand, the large-knuckled awkwardness of it on her slender arm. She made a sharp movement as if to pull away. Then she clenched her fist and jerked her arm in the direction of his chest so now it was as if he were holding her at bay. “Why do you never speak?” she pleaded. “Say something!”

They remained locked like this, obdurate, combatant, for several moments until Eamon flushed and tossed Klara’s arm back toward her body as if it were a broken branch he were removing from his path. Then he was out of the chair.

“And what is it you would have me say?” he asked, his voice half broken by anger and sorrow. “What can I possibly say to you?” He swung toward the door she had been planning to exit from, stopped as if he might have added one more word to his own question, then strode through the woodshed and out across the damp snow in the yard, his head down, his hands thrust into his pockets.

The shaft of setting sun that had so troubled Klara’s eyes was now on the chair where Eamon had been sitting. He had forgotten his jacket. Klara’s arm remained near her stomach, where it had come to rest after Eamon released it. It looked like a foreign object to her, something that was not now and had never been connected to her body. She watched with some interest as colour gradually returned to the white marks his fingers had left on her skin.

The next night he didn’t walk up the hill at all.

And she waited for him.

“Where’s old Silent got to, I wonder?” asked her father, looking up at her over the tops of the glasses he wore to read in the evening.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Klara replied. “But it’s good to have our house back to ourselves, I’d say.”

“He was no trouble sitting quietly in the kitchen.” Dieter looked at his daughter with fondness, amused by her petulance. “I’d say it’s a good change to have a young man come into the house.”

Klara didn’t answer. She had been looking through the glass panel at the top of the door that led to the side porch, and had been distracted by the appearance of a figure far down the road. But whoever it was had gone off on the path that led to the village before she could accurately determine whether it was Eamon.

Some of Klara’s temperament had been inherited from her grandfather. Whenever she looked at his serene face she could never believe that he had once been moved by any kind of passion. And yet he told her that as a young man in Bavaria he had been thought pious because he was known to break down and weep in front of altarpieces, and in the presence of statues of the Madonna or the saints. But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit that had touched him; he was a worshipper of graven images, a lover of wooden skin. Sometimes, particularly when he was locked in a visual trance in front of a piece by the great sixteenth-century carver Tilman Riemenschneider, his tears would be those of joy and frustration. He would adore the figure itself, the long thighs, the branching streams of veins on the inner arms, but he would be driven almost to despair by the knowledge that he would never be able to cause such vitality to enter wood.

By the time Father Archangel Gstir came into his life, Joseph Becker was a craftsman of great skill—the priest thought him wonderfully gifted—but he himself was aware of his own limitations, and often when he was alone with the work he was doing for the procession, he would feel the tears begin to sting his eyes. For several agonizing minutes he would curse the God who had given him just enough of the gift to understand what he lacked, the same God that had permitted him to be carving at the outer reaches of the world among people who would be able to comprehend neither his ability nor his limitations. He would be forever a perfectionist incapable of achieving the quality of perfection he worshipped in the great master’s work. And his granddaughter had inherited from him a need for order, a sort of corollary of perfection.

Klara had also inherited a tendency toward the kind of anger she had seen increase daily in her mother after Tilman’s disappearance, and had incorporated into her own personality, as well as into her work, the sense of superiority with which her mother rode through the unworthy world that had taken her son away.

Helga Becker had always insisted that the service she performed was tailoring, and that it was as different from dressmaking as medieval tapestry-making was to pillow-slip embroidery. “Any fool can be a dressmaker,” she had told Klara. “Anyone capable of looking in a woman’s magazine and stitching two hunks of cloth together.” But tailoring, she had maintained, required talent, skill, and patience. “And you are not just covering something up,” she had said. “You are constructing something with shape and weight and volume. A garment that is
tailored
. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I can’t be a tailor. And don’t call me a seamstress either. Anyone who can hold a needle can be a seamstress.”

As an orphaned girl, Helga had been trained by the woman who would eventually become her mother-in-law, and she had strongly objected to the older woman’s modesty. “Imagine,” she would say to Klara, “your grandmother calling herself a seamstress right up until the day she died, when she could plan and cut and sew circles around those men in Goderich calling themselves tailors. And she did so much for the church. In my opinion, in his old age, Father Gstir was better dressed than the Pope.”

Klara’s mother had made good coats and jackets for almost everyone in the village, and travelling suits for the women, though hardly anyone took the journeys these outfits were designed for. She drew the line at men’s trousers, for decency’s sake, but reasoned that this was no great loss as men were apt to buy the readymades down at Hafeman’s store. “They’d buy their suit jackets there too,” she had confided, “if they didn’t have to face me looking at them in such sad get-ups. Me, who can make a fine figure out of the sorriest of them with my tailored waistcoats. I’ve been the making of most of the men in this village,” she asserted, “and a great number of the women as well.”

It was true that the citizens of Shoneval were as well attired a congregation as entered a Catholic church anywhere in Ontario, especially in comparison to the collection of ragged folk that had shivered inside the first log church constructed in Father Gstir’s day, folk who had neither the time nor the money to think about whether they wanted or needed waistcoats and travelling suits. Now it was a fine sight indeed to see such well-appointed people climb the hill to mass, then descend that same hill again to make the traditional Sunday visit to Der Archangel. In the early days the good Father had led his little flock down to the brewery for the customary tankard after mass. When the tavern was completed shortly after the consecration of the large stone church in 1881, Father Gstir had been greatly moved when the innkeeper elected to name the new establishment after his confessor.

Klara, skilled with a needle from childhood and a marvel with scissors from her adolescence on, had taken over her mother’s business at sixteen, after Helga had been dead for about half a year. At first the men were shy of her, this young girl with the shining golden hair, but gradually they had relaxed in the face of her businesslike, formal, almost superior manner.

“Men are the most vain creatures on God’s earth,” her mother had told Klara, “even farmers. They claim they don’t like to dress for Sundays, but they’re just like peacocks once you get a coat on them. Add a piece of silk braid to the coat and there’s no living with them.”

“And remember this,” she had added, “all men like to believe they have fine figures … even though next to none of them have. Tailors … good tailors cause magical transformations to take place. A good suit jacket creates an enviable illusion so a fine tailor is indispensable—mostly because of male vanity. Those farmers could no more create this illusion themselves than they could make palm trees flourish in their winter fields. You, therefore, will be indispensable.”

Indispensable or not, Klara gave two hours of each day to sewing in the winter and sometimes up to four hours in the summer when the light lasted well into the evening and she was able to work after supper. She had, as a result, a good collection of “show” garments, the ability to complete projects well and on time, and a much cherished bank account of her own. None of the other young women she knew, with the exception of two or three nuns, were as independent as she was, and the knowledge of this contributed greatly to her as yet unrecognized contentment.

Eamon didn’t walk up to the farm the next night either. Or the night after that. Or in the weeks that followed. Thankfully, with the lengthening days, her father became too busy in the fields after supper to ask about the boy. And Klara herself had her sewing to attend to. But now it was as if she were always waiting for something or, worse, as if she were searching for something she could barely remember. All those who were gone from her life haunted her, but imprecisely, never really materializing into brother, or mother, or lost friend. It was as if, against her will, her mind had decided to develop a philosophy of absenteeism, so that the tree felled in the yard five years ago or the broken platter she had tossed into the farm dump last summer now suddenly became grave losses, though she could not call to mind a branch or stem or leaf or the specifics of a china pattern. She stormed through the house for days looking for a pair of kid gloves that had belonged to her mother, finding them at last in the attic, dried and yellowed by the heat of several summers.

I have not paid enough attention, she thought, looking at the two wrinkled pieces of leather that were so disturbingly like the human hands they were meant to cover. When she picked them up, the leather fingers curled softly over her own, as if someone were attempting to press her hand. The palms and the ends of the thumbs, she noticed, were slightly soiled.

Klara stood alone in the dim light of the attic, her serious face partially lit by one low window. “I have never,” she whispered, closing her fist around the gloves, “I have never paid enough attention.”

S
ometimes, during the howling winter nights of the first year Father Gstir spent near the gristmill and the sawmill that would eventually become the centre of Shoneval, he would surprise himself by becoming discouraged. He had never seen such weather, was not precisely certain that the performance of the elements was natural even in this northern place where no Christian had chosen to live before. Drifts climbed up the outside walls of his cabin and pushed their way under his wooden door. Snow swirled around the glass of his one window until it became completely covered with a thick rind of frost that could only be chipped off with a knife. His bible was glued by ice to the table, the table was glued by ice to the floor. Washing—either his clothing or himself—was unthinkable and, although the idea of sweat was unimaginable, he was not unaware of his own body odour and that of Joseph’s when he was visiting, an odour that he decided was somehow even more rancid in cold air than it would have been in warm.

When he was alone on these nights he consoled himself by thinking of his royal benefactor’s castles. Though he knew very little about them, he imagined their architecture, their absurd constructions, their rooms of fuchsia and turquoise, the music in them, the pageantry. He saw them rise—against all odds—on the pinnacles of such extraordinary mountains that, in his more rational moments, he suspected did not exist—not in Bavaria, not anywhere. He knew that Ludwig’s preposterous stone bouquets of towers and arches were in no way connected to God, that they celebrated almost all of the deadly sins, but still he loved them harder for their insistence on the secular.

As he sat practically embracing the iron stove from which little heat seemed to emanate despite its insatiable hunger for logs, one castle after another would swell and fade in his head, the way the sound of a great bell expands, holds volume and tone for a glorious moment, and then recedes like someone walking toward and then away from you. Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, the huge follies built first in the king’s mind by his love of German mythology and by his imagination and later constructed on mountaintops by his peasants and his will. Before Father Gstir left Bavaria he had heard only rumours of plans for these palaces; they could not possibly have been completed in the intervening time. And yet here they were, fully embellished, draped, and painted in the mind of a cold priest huddled in the heart of a Canadian forest.

He talked about the castles with Joseph one night in February, both of them sitting side by side on a rough wooden bench with their boots on the fender of the stove. “What would your thoughts be on a great work of architecture perched so high no road could reach it?”

Joseph, more practical, pointed out that such a work of architecture could not be constructed without a road to bring in men and materials. His long hands appeared to be shaping the road, carving the men and the materials as he spoke.

“Perhaps the road … this impossible road … might be sealed up afterwards,” Father Gstir ventured, “so that one could do nothing more than gaze at this marvel from a distance.”

“But King Ludwig would want to live at least some of the time in his castles.” Joseph sniffed the smell of scorched leather in the air, then removed his boots from the heat source. Each night the men moved their feet back and forth in the vicinity of the fender, having to choose between numb toes or burnt footwear.