The Stone Angel

THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

General Editor: David Staines

ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe

ABOVE THE TOWN,
on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet, in memory of her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one, my mother’s angel that my father bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied, forever and a day.

Summer and winter she viewed the town with sightless eyes. She was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even a pretense of sight. Whoever carved her had left the eyeballs blank. It seemed strange to me that she should stand above the town, harking us all to heaven without knowing who we were at all. But I was too young then to know her purpose, although my father often told me she had been brought from Italy at a terrible expense and was pure white marble. I think now she must have been carved in that distant sun by stone masons who were the cynical descendants of Bernini, gouging out her like by the score, gauging with admirable accuracy the needs of fledgling pharaohs in an uncouth land.

Her wings in winter were pitted by the snow and in summer by the blown grit. She was not the only angel in the Manawaka cemetery, but she was the first, the largest, and certainly the costliest. The others, as I recall, were a
lesser breed entirely, petty angels, cherubim with pouting stone mouths, one holding aloft a stone heart, another strumming in eternal silence upon a small stone string-less harp, and yet another pointing with ecstatic leer to an inscription. I remember that inscription because we used to laugh at it when the stone was first placed there.

So much for sad Regina, now forgotten in Manawaka—as I, Hagar, am doubtless forgotten. And yet I always felt she had only herself to blame, for she was a flimsy, gutless creature, bland as egg custard, caring with martyred devotion for an ungrateful fox-voiced mother year in and year out. When Regina died, from some obscure and maidenly disorder, the old disreputable lady rose from sick-smelling sheets and lived, to the despair of her married sons, another full ten years. No need to say God rest
her
soul, for she must be laughing spitefully in hell, while virginal Regina sighs in heaven.

In summer the cemetery was rich and thick as syrup with the funeral-parlor perfume of the planted peonies, dark crimson and wallpaper pink, the pompous blossoms hanging leadenly, too heavy for their light stems, bowed down with the weight of themselves and the weight of the rain, infested with upstart ants that sauntered through the plush petals as though to the manner born.

I used to walk there often when I was a girl. There could not have been many places to walk primly in those days, on paths, where white kid boots and dangling skirts
would not be torn by thistles or put in unseemly disarray. How anxious I was to be neat and orderly, imagining life had been created only to celebrate tidiness, like prissy Pippa as she passed. But sometimes through the hot rush of disrespectful wind that shook the scrub oak and the coarse couchgrass encroaching upon the dutifully cared-for habitations of the dead, the scent of the cowslips would rise momentarily. They were tough-rooted, these wild and gaudy flowers, and although they were held back at the cemetery’s edge, torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking there could catch the faint, musky, dust-tinged smell of things that grew untended and had grown always, before the portly peonies and the angels with rigid wings, when the prairie bluffs were walked through only by Cree with enigmatic faces and greasy hair.

    Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past—that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all. But one dissembles, usually, for the sake of such people as Marvin, who is somehow comforted by the picture of old ladies feeding like docile rabbits on the lettuce leaves of other times, other manners. How unfair I am. Well, why not? To carp like this—it’s my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom. Marvin thinks it disgraceful of me to smoke, at my age, ninety. To him there is
something distressing in the sight of Hagar Shipley, who by some mischance happens to be his mother, with a little white burning tube held saucily between arthritic fingers. Now I light one of my cigarettes and stump around my room, remembering furiously, for no reason except that I am caught up in it. I must be careful not to speak aloud, though, for if I do Marvin will look at Doris and Doris will look meaningfully back at Marvin, and one of them will say, “Mother’s having one of her days.” Let them talk. What do I care now what people say? I cared too long.

Oh, my lost men. No, I will not think of that. What a disgrace to be seen crying by that fat Doris. The door of my room has no lock. They say it is because I might get taken ill in the night, and then how could they get in to tend me
(tend
—as though I were a crop, a cash crop). So they may enter my room any time they choose. Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It’s because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.

I’d be about six, surely, when I had that plaid pinafore, pale green and pale red—not pink, a watery red, rather, like the flesh of a ripe watermelon, made by an aunt in Ontario and grandly piped in black velveteen. There was I, strutting the board sidewalk like a pint-sized peacock, resplendent, haughty, hoity-toity, Jason Currie’s black-haired daughter.

Before I started school, I was such a nuisance to Auntie Doll. The big house was new then, the second brick house to be built in Manawaka, and she had the feeling always that she must live up to it, although she was hired help. She was a widow, and had been with us since my
birth. She wore a white lace boudoir cap in the mornings, and shrilled at me like a witch when I tweaked it off, exposing her frizzled mop to the chortling eyes of Reuben Pearl who brought the milk. At such times she’d ship me off to the store, and there my father would sit me down on an empty upturned apple-box, amid the barrels of dried apricots and raisins and the smell of brown paper and sizing from the bolts of cloth in the dry goods section, and make me memorize weights and measures.

Two glasses, one noggin. Four noggins, one pint. Two pints, one quart. Four quarts, one gallon. Two gallons, one peck. Four pecks, one bushel.”

He’d stand there behind the counter, bulky and waist-coated, his voice with its Scots burr prompting me when I forgot, and telling me to concentrate or I’d never learn.

“Do you want to grow up to be a dummy, a daft loon?”

“No.”

Then concentrate.”

When I repeated them all through, Troy Weight, Long and Lineal Measure, Imperial Dry Measure, Cubic Measure, he’d nod.

That’s all he’d ever say, when I got it right. He never believed in wasting a word or a minute. He was a self-made man. He had started without a bean, he was fond of telling Matt and Dan, and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. It was true. No one could deny it. My brothers took after our mother, graceful unspirited boys who tried to please him but rarely could. Only I, who didn’t want to
resemble him in the least, was sturdy like him and bore his hawkish nose and stare that could meet anyone’s without blinking an eyelash.

The devil finds work for idle hands
. He put his faith in homilies. They were his Pater Noster, his Apostles’ Creed. He counted them off like beads on a rosary, or coins in the till.
God helps those who help themselves. Many hands make light work
.

He always used birch for whippings. That’s what had been used by his father on him, although in another country. I don’t know what he’d have done if no birch had flourished around Manawaka. Luckily, our bluffs sprouted a few—they were thin and puny, and never grew to any height, but they served the purpose. Matt and Dan got the most of it, being boys and older, and when they did, they’d come and do to me as they’d been done to, only they used maple, green switches with the leaves still on. You wouldn’t think those soft leaves would sting, but they did, on bare flanks still pudgy with baby fat, and I’d howl like the triple-mouthed beasts of hell, as much from shame as hurt, and they’d hiss that if I told they’d take the saw-toothed breadknife that hung in the pantry and open my throat and I’d bleed to death and be left empty and white as Hannah Pearl’s stillborn baby that we’d seen at Simmons’ Funeral Parlor in its white satin box. But when I’d heard Matt called “four eyes” at school, because he had to wear glasses, and Auntie Doll scold Dan because he’d wet his bed although he was past eight, then I knew they’d never dare, so I told. That put an end to it, and what they got served them right, and he let me watch. After, though, I was sorry I’d witnessed it, and tried to tell them so, but they wouldn’t hear me out.