The Stone Carvers (19 page)

In early December, when it seemed he would never be warm again, he met an agitated figure—a bundle of quivering rags—on the road between Goderich and Clinton. He had been on his own for several weeks, long enough to become so familiar with the sound of his chain rattling behind him that he was instantly put on the alert when the sound ceased. He stopped and turned and saw a person behind him who was holding the last link with one crooked finger and who, when he tried to run, grasped the chain with two fists. Whoever it was reeled him in like a difficult carp.

“Who are you?” the figure demanded in a woman’s voice. “What’s yer name?”

He was close enough to her now that he could see clear blue eyes and a hawklike nose. The rest of the face was wrapped in scarves. A cap with earflaps covered the head.

“What’s yer name?” the woman repeated. “Did you escape from a chain gang?”

The sound of Tilman’s heart was so loud it seemed to be coming from outside his body. When he felt her tug on the taut chain, he began to shake.

“Yer just a kid,” the woman said. “Think I’ll call you chain-gang kid.” She laughed and rattled the chain. “Do you like it, chain-gang kid?”

Tilman did not answer.

“The name, I mean.”

Silence. The cold was enough to kill you. That plus the fear made his teeth chatter.

Without letting go of the chain the woman removed one of her several shawls and threw it over Tilman’s shoulders. “That’ll make it better. You ain’t been on the road for long, that’s plain.”

Tilman shook his head. His first response.

“Well, you won’t get far with this thing draggin’ behind you like the leash of a mad dog. ‘Sides, we can sell it for scrap metal. My name’s Crazy Phoebe,” she said, holding firm to his chain with her left hand while extending her right.

Tilman put his own hands behind his back. He had always distrusted this strange gesture that joined adults to one another.

“Don’t shake then,” the woman said. “I’ll shake your chain instead.” She did this and laughed, breaking into a cough that lasted for several minutes while Tilman looked down at the road. “Giddy-up,” the woman said when she had recovered herself. “Let’s get goin’. Lucky for you I live in two places and one of them is junkyards, or at least them ones without them beasts from hell and has good owners. We’ll get rid of this,” she shook his chain again, “outside Goderich. Good junkyard there. Somebody’ll cut her off yer at the junkyard.”

They began to walk. After a long silence, the woman continued, “The other places I live is basements, but only at farms with cellar doors.” They walked past the whole length of a prosperous-looking farm. “And good farmwives,” she added. “Some women is hell. They’s preserves in them basements been down there for years everyone’s forgot. They’s way back in the darkest parts hid by spiderwebs so as no one sees them, put there by some old granny whose all bones now in the graveyard. One year I lived entirely on strawberry jam. Fat as a dumpling when spring come.” She peered closely at Tilman. “You could use some fattening,” she said. “What yer been eating?”

More silence from Tilman. Each night at dusk he had slunk toward compost heaps and dumps. One day he had eaten nothing but tea leaves and potato peels. Another day he had drunk a half-bottle of Doc Chrighton’s Grippe Reliever he had found among mostly broken and empty medicine bottles in a midden behind a woodlot. This had left him staggering and drowsy for two days. Since then the world had seemed slightly askew, and certain sounds—a dry leaf scraping over pebbles or a door slamming in the distance—had startled and disturbed him.

“Chain child,” said Crazy Phoebe after a long pause, “you’re not even a kid, you’re a child. Kids roam in packs, as you’ll find out once you’re one of them. Chain child. Sounds better.”

Now the chain hung slack between them as if they’d been skipping rope like he knew girls did, while chanting rhymes in a menacing minor key, in the schoolyard. It was as if he and this woman were waiting for another song to come into their minds.

“Up there’s the yard,” said Phoebe after another stretch of silent walking. “Old Ham Bone there’ll cut her off’n you.”

Tilman could see only a seemingly endless board fence, painted green.

“Knew old Ham Bone in my youth when he was still raising hogs, knew him before I was crazy. Knew his dog too.”

“What’s the dog’s name?” asked Tilman, his first question.

“Saw Tooth,” Phoebe answered. “Known old Saw Tooth since he was a pup out barkin’ the bejeesus outta Ham Bone’s piglets on the farm. Known him since before I was crazy. Old Ham Bone give up the farm cause he didn’t have no woman round there no more. Anyways, he always got blue when them piglets growed up and had to be slaughtered. Saw Tooth got blue too. You know what happens to a growed-up piglet what isn’t slaughtered?”

Tilman did not.

“Damn things get so big from overeating they can’t raise themselves up on the hoof to get to the trough for no more slops so they starve to death.” Phoebe shook her head. “Damn things,” she repeated.

They were walking along the fence now, a fence so long it seemed to Tilman to divide the world in half, and a fence so tall Tilman knew there was no human being tall enough to see over it.

Finally Phoebe forced aside one large, loose green board and squeezed through the fence, pulling Tilman after her. He was not unaware that the regular entrance, which was wide open, was only a few yards off. “Always go in this way,” Phoebe told him. She rearranged her several shawls that had become even more dishevelled when they caught on boards and projecting nails. “Always go out this way too,” she added in a conspiratorial whisper.

Tilman looked around him at an array of rusting farm machinery, threshers, binders, hand and horse ploughs, pumps, gears, wrought iron, fire escapes, boilers, wheel axles, woodstoves, coal furnaces, and various unidentifiable bits and pieces. Behind two or three tangled lengths of iron he could see a wooden shack with a stovepipe projecting from its roof.

“Ham Bone,” Phoebe yelled at the building. “Ham Bone, get out here and see. Phoebe’s got a brand-new dog fine enough to make Saw Tooth pea green with envy.”

The door opened and a medium-sized dog whose black-and-white coat appeared to be made up of moulting feathers sprang into noise and action. Tilman moved behind his female companion while a black-and-white blur made loud, furious circles around the two of them.

“Saw Tooth!” shouted Phoebe. “For God’s sake, settle down. I was just fooling. It’s just a tethered boy called Chain Child.”

Saw Tooth shimmied over to Phoebe and licked her hand, then lay on his back while she caressed his feathered stomach.

Tilman was watching a large, red-faced man emerge from the open door of the shack and begin to walk toward them. “What the hell …” the man said when he saw Tilman’s chain. “What the hell is this all about?”

“Don’t know nothing about it, Ham Bone,” Phoebe said while absently rattling the links. “Except think it should be off’n him.”

“Jesus, kid,” said Ham Bone. “Where did you get that chain?”

Tilman did not answer.

“Jesus,” said Ham Bone again. Then he walked back to his shed and returned a few moments later with a hacksaw. “Hold still, boy,” he commanded as he placed the chain on a nearby anvil and began to saw.

“What yer gonna do about that harness?” asked Phoebe when the chain was removed. “Can’t have Chain Child wearing that harness for the rest of his life. He’ll grow for sure, and that thing’ll break his ribs.”

Ham Bone sighed and went back to the shed for a smaller saw. When the lock was sawed open and the harness cast aside, the large man turned his attention to the woman. “Phoebe,” he began. To Tilman’s amazement he saw that the man’s eyes were filling with tears. “Phoebe,” he repeated, “where you been these last months?”

“No place near no hog barn,” she said. “What you gonna give Chain Child and me for that good scrap metal? Also we is cold, and we need some place to warm up.” She pointed toward the shack. “Let’s go in there,” she said.

Ham Bone leaned down and looked Tilman in the eyes. “You’re mighty dirty, boy,” he said. “You think you could find me a washtub out here with no holes in the bottom? Holes in the top is fine, but holes in the bottom is no good. You find me a washtub and we’ll give you a bath.”

This reference to domesticity put Tilman on guard. “I won’t stay,” he said.

“I won’t stay neither,” announced Phoebe.

“I know that,” said Ham Bone softly. “I know that.”

Tilman waited until the adults disappeared inside the shack. Then he twisted his upper body and flung his arms and legs about in all directions, delighted to be free of the yoke. It was getting near dark when Tilman knocked on the shack door, having found a serviceable tub. Once he was inside, room temperature hit him like a furnace blast. Ham Bone had heated up a large can of beans, which they all shared silently. After this the man excused himself to lock up the yard and to fill the tub with water at the outside pump. When he returned he placed the tub on the woodstove. Tilman, experiencing warmth for the first time in weeks, dozed in his chair until Ham Bone used his own large coat to make the boy a bed on the floor. Some time later Tilman was awakened by Saw Tooth licking his face. The dog circled three times, then lay down at his side. From their place in the shadows, the boy and the dog watched the adults.

Ham Bone lifted the tub from the stove and tested the water with his hand. Then he stood and looked at the woman, who was slouching in a chair on the opposite side of the room.

“C’mon, Phoebe,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You ain’t gonna get at me.”

“I won’t get at you,” said Ham Bone softly, “but, Phoebe, you don’t smell so good.”

“I’m shamed by that,” said Phoebe in a voice new to Tilman.

“It’s not your fault,” Ham Bone approached her slowly. “Let me take off these clothes, Phoeb.”

“No,” she replied but did not move away from him.

He placed a large hand on her head. “Phoeb,” he said again as he began to unwind one of the several scarves she had tied around her head.

From where Tilman lay, everything seemed to be slowed by heat and by the orange light thrown from the coal oil lantern. That and the panting of the dog, whose warmth now penetrated the boy’s left side.

“I won’t let you take nothing off’n me,” said Phoebe in her new voice, which had lost direction and meaning.

Ham Bone was removing her shawls, layer by layer. Tilman watched amazed as the woman who had rescued him became smaller and smaller. The dog sighed contentedly and put his nose between his front paws.

Tilman counted five skirts falling to the floor and still Phoebe was covered by clothing. But her surprisingly long, thin arms were bare now and hung limply by her side.

“What about that boy?” she said. “He ain’t never seen a woman undressing, that’s for sure.”

“He’s asleep,” said Ham Bone. He removed a soiled petticoat and a camisole, and Phoebe’s thin, white body reflected the lamplight and seemed to Tilman to shake off the darkness of the shadows around her. As a last gesture, Ham Bone unwound the final scarf wrapped tight to her head and a profusion of red curls exploded around her shoulders.

Tilman was just a child, but he knew that the woman he was looking at was younger than his mother. And he knew that she was beautiful.

“You didn’t smell so good yerself,” said Phoebe, “before I was crazy and you was coming in from the hog barns.”

“No, Phoebe,” said Ham Bone. “No, I didn’t.” He took her hand. “Come on,” he said gently, “come on into the water.”

“I won’t set right down in it.”

“No, that’s fine, just step in there.” Ham Bone crossed the room and took a rag from a nail on the wall, then returned to where Phoebe was standing in the tub.

The scene that unfolded before Tilman was one he would never forget. Years later when he came at last to love someone, the memory of this night would fall like rain into his mind: the gentle tenderness, the sound of falling water. He would remember the way the young woman’s buttocks and calves shone when the man had put water there, and the glistening snails’ tracks on her belly that, as an adult, Tilman would realize meant that she had borne a child. He would remember the tears on the large man’s face as he moved the cloth under her breasts and down the insides of her thighs. And he would remember her utter submissiveness after all her protestations.

Now Phoebe placed her hands on Ham Bone’s shoulders as he crouched before her and washed first one foot and then the other.

“How did I get to be crazy?” she asked, her head bent.

Ham Bone was silent. He wrung out the cloth, and the water sounded like a wealth of grief as it entered the tub.

“Will you come home, Phoebe?” he asked quietly. “You don’t have to be crazy no more. We could take in the boy.”

Tilman stiffened, preparing, as always, for flight at the suggestion of confinement.

But Phoebe refused. “I don’t hold with homes,” she said. “Homes is where sorrow is at.”

Ham Bone took off his shirt and put it like a nightgown on her as she stepped out of the tub. Then he moved behind her and circled her waist with his arms, drawing her down until they were both kneeling, she on his lap. He pushed her slowly forward, then guiding her chin to her chest he brushed her red hair into the warm water.

“It feels good,” Phoebe said, “this warm water on my head.”

“I know,” said Ham Bone. “I’ll wash your clothes if you sleep the night here.”

“You won’t get at me?”

“No, but you’ll eat something, and you’ll spend the night here.”

“If I was to let you get at me,” said Phoebe, “we’d only have another baby what would die.”

She began to weep.

Ham Bone held her. “I won’t get at you, Phoeb,” he said. “I know you’d only go away again anyways.”

The next morning Phoebe shook Tilman awake while it was still dark. The boy scrambled nervously to his feet at her touch, then pivoted in the dark trying to determine where he was. When he saw the glowing coals of the pot-bellied stove, he remembered the warmth of the scene he had witnessed the previous evening, and the fact that the chain and the harness were gone, and he felt light-headed, giddy with new physical freedom.