Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [15]
The stone itself, a dolomitic limestone, is more beautiful and easier to handle than that which my father knew growing up in Stonewall, Manitoba. Natural chemical alterations give it its unique lacy look. It comes in two colors, a light buff mixed with brown, and (my favorite) a pale gray with darker gray mottles.
Some folks call it tapestry stone, and they prize, especially, its random fossils: gastropods, brachiopods, trilobites, corals and snails.
As the flesh of these once-living creatures decayed, a limey mud filled the casings and hardened to rock. My father has had only limited schooling, but he’s blessed with a naturalist’s curiosity and not long ago he hacked out a few of the more interesting fossil pieces and carried them home to show to his wife, Mercy. (The stone with which she weighted her Malvern pudding on the day of my birth contained three fused fossils of an extremely rare type, so rare that they have never to this day been properly classified.)
What is it that makes Cuyler Goodwill walk home at the end of the day with the sun still hot and yellow overhead, what makes him whistle the way he does? I’ve already said he likes to stretch his cramped muscles after his hours of toil, and I imagine—this is a particular fancy of mine—that he likes to extend his very limbs, to feel himself grow taller, bigger, stronger as he moves closer to home, closer to the man he is about to become. A husband. A lover.
He is awaited. This is an unlooked-for gift of happiness—to be awaited. He possesses a roof (rented to be sure but a roof none the less), and a supper table already set, and a wife he worships. Body and soul, he worships her.
Nothing in his life has prepared him for the notion of love.
Some early damage—a needle-faced father, a dishevelled stick of a mother, the absence of brothers and sisters—had persuaded him he would remain all his life a child, with a child’s stunted appetite.
His family, the Goodwills, seemed left in the wake of the stern, old, untidy century that conceived them, and they give off, all three of them, father, mother, child, an aroma of impotence, spindly in spirit and puny of body. The house they lived in faced directly on to the lime kilns of Stonewall. It sat at the end of a dirty road, its porch askew. The windows, flecked with yellow ash from the kilns, went unwashed from one year to the next, and the kitchen roof leaked; it had always leaked. In rainy weather the chimney smoked. Bread baked in this house was heavy, uneven, scarce.
Wages that might have been spent on repairs or small luxuries were kept in an old jam pot, the dollar bills heaped up there like crushed leaves, soiled, aromatic. In the summer time the men of the town might gather at the corner of Jackson and Maria for a game of horseshoes, but the Goodwill men, father and son, were seldom asked to take part. The reasons for their exclusion are not clear.
Perhaps it was assumed that they were indifferent to forms of recreation or that they lacked essential skills, or that they might contaminate the others with their peculiar joyless depletion.
Sharp-eyed Mrs. Goodwill, on the other hand, out of some worn Christian persuasion, pinned a felt hat to her head each Sunday morning and attended services at the Presbyterian Church, but no one suggested that Cuyler come along.
No inquiries, in fact, were ever made as to his spiritual or physical health. His opinion