The Stone Carvers (5 page)

The house, which was Klara’s childhood home, had not always been empty. Once, there had been a father and a mother. Once there had been a brother. Each had left a trace of himself or herself in one room or another: a pipe, a set of suspenders, a jewellery box, a hand mirror, a small pair of good Sunday boots. And each had left something unresolved in Klara, words spoken, or not spoken, or words spoken in anger. Each had left an empty chair at the table.

It had taken her mother, Helga Becker, five years to die. When the actual physical sickness set in during the last six months of her mother’s life, Klara realized she had known since the age of ten that some dark thing was growing slowly larger inside the woman who had given birth to her. When at fifteen she was told about the cancer and how it would soon kill her mother, it seemed to Klara that, like the dimension of her brother’s absence that expanded at the close of each new day, this tumour had been gradually filling her mother’s skull, slowly pushing the light and the life out of their house.

After Klara’s brother had been gone for a full year, and her mother’s fits of weeping and formidable tantrums had ceased, a new, clipped practicality appeared to enter her. She seemed then to be perpetually angered by the superficiality of a world that could continue on with its business in the face of the total dematerialization of her son. It was during this time that she began to teach Klara the art of tailoring, but without tenderness, as if she felt that her young daughter were part of this conspiracy of ordinariness and ought to be provided with some business to get on with. This phase was followed by greater and greater withdrawal, punctuated by terse statements suggesting that her husband, Dieter, was to blame for the boy’s disappearance and therefore, by association, responsible for her own unhappiness, though she never spoke of Tilman except when making these allegations. When the subtle accusations were overheard by Klara, they terrified her, for though she had never said so, she felt that the real culprit was herself, that any blame ought to be aimed at her. In the end, though she left school and nursed her faithfully until the instant of her death, Klara no longer loved her mother but was able to muster no argument against her that did not circle back to her own actions.

But it was neither this nor the grief that accompanied it that Klara had been remembering the day she let the mist into the house.

When the land around Shoneval was cleared of trees and stumps and boulders by loggers and mill workers and farmers in the middle of the nineteenth century, several things began to happen. The stumps were used for fences, some of which, though not many, could still be seen in the vicinity of Klara’s farm. The boulders were gathered to make the foundations of houses and barns and various other buildings, and endured as memorials to the frame structures that once surmounted them. The trees, of course, if not used for building, made the journey to the sawmill, where they were subjected to the mutilation process that had so disturbed Joseph Becker. Excess rainfall, which was once thirstily consumed by the great forests, now had nowhere to go except downhill to collect in the depressions among gentle hills. Over time the lingering moisture produced new swampy areas where, in the beginning, willow trees flourished until they were killed by an overabundance of the liquid that had originally encouraged their growth.

It was the swamp nearest the farm that Klara had been recalling, the swamp frozen over in winter, its dead willows sparkling with frost. A scene not unlike one of those unfurled at a travelling medicine show. A scene not unlike those she had heard were painted on the walls of the Swan Room in one of King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles. A scene filled with stillness and the anticipation of dance.

Had she allowed it, Klara’s mind could still paint it, shining branch by shining branch: the dark perfect ice under a sky of eye-watering clarity, the young man and the young woman skating there. They had not moved together as partners but had made a game of it, skating the way young children skate in a kind of indiscriminate, inconclusive chase, for they were not many years removed from childhood and it was childhood’s echo that moved with them across the ice.

It had been late in the afternoon. Balanced on a hill behind them, the setting sun appeared to be tangled in the twisted forms of a stump fence, its rays colouring the steam of their breath a soft orange. Though they had known each other most of their lives, they were suddenly uncomfortable with each other and confused by the impulse that had sent them off to skate in this strange place, alone, while the other young villagers were filling the pond with laughter. Klara had turned suddenly and they had crashed together, had fallen, as if killed in combat. Then they had lain quite still on the ice, mysterious, and knowing something neither could speak about.

Klara remembered the warmth of his neck in the cold, his skin on the inch of her bare wrist between her mitten and her coat sleeve. His face had undergone a change, his expression becoming serious, the dark eyebrows gathered together as if he were puzzled or annoyed. In retrospect she believed that her face would have changed as well though she couldn’t have known that at the time.

After that afternoon he would tramp up to the farm in the evenings and sit on a chair in the kitchen, his legs apart, his arms resting on his knees, his eyes on the floor between his feet. “Silent Irish,” her father called him though they knew his name was Eamon, for the young man came from one of the very first Irish families who had been drawn by their faith to the Catholic settlement that was developing around Shoneval. Eamon didn’t speak at all for the first few months, and Klara herself said very little. But she wanted talk, some sort of declaration or interpretation, an explanation perhaps for the waves of dread that accompanied her attraction to him, for the subtle anger his coming to the farm each evening seemed to cause in him, and in her, for the way he appeared to endure the hours near her as if they were punishment.

At night she would kneel by her bed and pray that he would speak to her. “One word,” she would whisper, “one sentence.” She had never in her short life been this perplexed by anyone. And she had never confessed him. What would there have been to say? “We fell together on the ice, Father, and have been angry with each other ever since.” There was no sin in that, except the anger, and therefore no resolution beyond the suggestion that one or the other should apologize, but for what Klara did not know.

While he sat in silence, evening after evening in the large farm kitchen, Klara performed her domestic duties noisily, banging stove lids, rattling dishes in the pan, slamming the bottom drawers of the hutch cupboard. The kitchen was hers, really, had been so since she had turned fifteen, since her mother had died. She believed she resented this foreign intrusion into what she had marked out as her own territory. Until this moment there had been just her father and herself, night after night, their habits and conversation a hymn to predictability.

The grandparents walked over from their own farm sometimes for a Sunday meal. Once or twice a year the new Irish priest visited, and some of the Sisters had come for tea. But there had been no raw energy in these rooms since her brother disappeared in their childhood. And she had become comfortable with being the sole custodian of youth in the house.

The weeks passed and Klara was no better able to explain the suffocating tension that seemed to enter with Eamon through the door, how his presence made the clocks tick louder and louder in a silence that grew like a lengthening shadow. Her father read the paper or a book near the stove and sporadically announced a surprising bit of news he had discovered in his reading or a change of farming practice he had heard about in town. The boy answered monosyllabically. The rustle of the paper, the creak of the Boston rocker set Klara’s teeth on edge.

She was nineteen years old then. Until the accident of her uneasy and inexplicable connection with this boy, she had been happily spending her days engaged in the two professions she inherited from her mother—housekeeping and tailoring—and the one pastime she had learned from her grandfather—woodcarving. The first two activities gave her full run of the house; her sewing and cutting taking place in the sunroom over the porch, and most of her domestic duties, save the weekly dusting and waxing of the parlour, occupying the large kitchen. The moments of solitude with scissors, needle, chisel knife, or ladle—all much-loved tools—and the easy companionship her work led to—fittings and fashion consultations, shopping, and meals—were cherished by her. Each occupation fed the other, making her life, ironically for a tailor, seamless. Her handling of household objects gave her a greater knowledge of the shape and weight of things, and her measuring and fitting gave her much information about the structure of human anatomy, information she could in turn put to use when carving wooden saints. And the saints, themselves, she believed, bestowed grace on all the work she undertook to perform.

She made the saints in a small wooden building that had once been the farm’s blacksmith shop. The old oven served well now to warm the air in the winter and to heat up the pots of horse-hoof glue Klara sometimes used to fasten the arms on her attempts at larger figures. Even with the door closed, the one south-facing window allowed her enough light to see what she was doing. The building’s small size and its separation from the house gave the whole exercise the atmosphere of play; carving was the reward that she permitted herself when her other chores were completed. Pure pleasure came to her then as the fashioning of her wooden people was connected to neither the necessities of survival nor the need to bring cash into the household.

When she was a child, her grandfather had taught her how to whittle a small piece of wood, though it was really her brother, Tilman, that the old man had his eye on. He had hoped the boy would develop enough skill to at least make repairs to the church altars, if not fully embrace the profession of woodcarving, but Tilman’s attention span proved to be short when he was indoors, while Klara howled and stomped in the workshop until her grandfather reluctantly handed her some wood and a knife and showed her how to cut away from her body so she would not harm herself.

In the beginning, Klara made toy animals: horses, pigs, and cows. Then she began to create more exotic species, beasts she had never seen except on advertising cards: leopards, giraffes with exaggerated necks and spots, or rhinos with horns. Dolls were a logical next step, and since her mother was teaching her how to sew, she made elaborate wardrobes for them from scraps she gleaned from the sunroom floor. She had a tendency to hoard her work at this early stage. Once, however, she made a complete Noah’s ark for her brother at Christmas, but because he had vanished by then, he never came into his old room to play with it. It remained at the back of the closet where she had placed it, untouched, practically unglimpsed, except by Klara herself, who checked now and then to see if he might have returned unnoticed to play with it in the night. Finally, when she was almost thirteen, filled with an indignation she didn’t even attempt to interpret, she took the dusty animals and their houseboat to the kitchen stove and dropped them into the fire, two by two.

The saints began to emerge when Klara entered adolescence and had been confirmed at the church. Then shortly after her mother’s death she conceived the notion of making a life-sized statue of a medieval abbess—perhaps a saint—with a generously pleated habit. She would use what she had learned about cloth from her mother’s and, to a lesser extent, her own tailoring. Her grandfather would teach her what he knew about carving drapery. Her father would provide the wood for her when he cut log lengths for the next season’s fuel and brought them by sledge to the yard in midwinter.

Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Klara experienced contentment as she never would again—though, because she had not at the time known the restlessness of desire, she would come to acknowledge this contentment only in retrospect. Now when she sat cross-legged on the table in the sunroom cutting cloth, or when the chisel she held bit into the wood, there was a splendid animal unconsciousness about her, a fulsome sense of well-being. It never occurred to her to change her life. She was young, reasonably skilled, and in confident control of her surroundings. But when Eamon broke into her world, insisting by his stance and his silence that she make a space for him there, some part of her considered this an act of vandalism. She would never fully forgive the way he trespassed into her tranquillity, just as later she would never forgive his determined act of truancy.

The days lengthened, the snow began to melt, disclosing rough patches of the dark earth that had been ploughed the previous autumn after the harvest, and still each evening “Silent Irish” climbed the hill toward Klara’s kitchen.

By now Klara was in a blistering, tight-lipped rage whenever he was in her presence, and much of the time that he wasn’t.

“He’s courting you,” her quiet, sombre father told her with an uncharacteristic wink.

“I’m not interested in being courted by the likes of him,” Klara snapped, her face filling with colour. “I’m not interested in being courted.”

Dieter Becker shrugged his shoulders as if it mattered to him not at all. But the next clear, bright evening, after Eamon’s arrival, even before the boy had seated himself in his customary place, the older man excused himself and walked out to the barn.

Klara had her back to the door, was lowering a tall stack of plates into the warm suds of the dishpan when she felt the whole atmosphere change by the fact they were alone together. She stared hard at the two skimpy lilac bushes she had planted last fall in the yard. Knowing she was never going to be able to turn around, she could feel Eamon’s gaze touch her like a warm hand between her shoulder blades. There was no sound at all until finally she heard his footsteps on the floor, and then the sound a chair makes when a body is settling into it.

If she could manage to turn around, she decided, if she could just manage to do that, then she would be able to see things as they were, everything in place in her kitchen: a mat by the door, a damp tea towel thrown over a chair, all the reassuring furniture of her life undisturbed by his presence in her world. The thin branches of the lilac were bending to the left in a sudden evening breeze. The low sun, fiercely brilliant in the centre of the windowpane, was making her eyes fill with water. It was becoming almost impossible to continue to scrutinize the yard.