Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [30]
In his case it is an ecstatic communion. On Sundays he approaches his Maker by a series of ritualized steps, rising at dawn, taking a breakfast of tea and bread, then walking out, and in all weathers, to the burial grounds off the Quarry Road. As he walks he recites to himself a scrap of scripture, a single verse usually, which he repeats over and over.
There is none holy like the Lord, there is none beside thee.
Again and again. The words beat at his temples like a secondary pulse. His boots strike the surface of the roadway in an answering rhythm that draws him behind the scrim of ordinary consciousness. He meets no one coming and going—the hour is too early for man or beast. In a small handcart, which he has cobbled together himself from odds and ends, he transports the stones he intends to set. He has come to believe that the earth’s rough minerals are the signature of the spiritual, and as such can be assembled and shaped into praise and affirmation. He also conveys, hooked into the loops of his belt, a mallet and a number of small chisels. His tools, his music, his offering—he carries all that he needs on his body.
Where my mother’s solitary gravestone once sat, now rises a hollow tower some thirty feet in height and still growing. The stones that constitute its fabric have been chosen for their strength and beauty and for their effect on the overall design. A spiral of cantilevered stones protrudes, and these allow him to ascend the steep sides as easily as an insect or a lizard might scale a wall.
More and more my father chooses to decorate the stone surfaces with elaborate cipher, even though Tyndall stone, with its mottled coloring, is thought to be resistant to fine carving. Patterns incised on this mineral form seem to evade the eye; you have to stand at a certain distance, and in a particular light, to make them out. This impediment is part of the charm for him. What he carves will remain half-hidden, half-exposed, and as such will reflect the capriciousness of the revealed world. Here he inscribes a few holy words, there the image of a bird, a flower, a fish, a face, a sun or moon. An angel half the size of his hand freezes on a worked limestone sky. A tiny stone horse grazes in a stony meadow. Cupids, mermaids, snakes, leaves, feathers, vines, bees, cattle, the curve of a rainbow, a texturing like skin—the tower is a museum of writhing forms, some of which he has discovered in the Canadian Farmer’s Almanac or the Eaton’s catalogue or in his illustrated Bible.
The carving is done on winter nights in the warmed untidy cave of his widower’s kitchen, where he has set up a workbench and vise and a good gas light. He has already, after a day at the quarry, eaten his supper of fried eggs and tinned peas, and is ready to make the stonedust fly. His tools are simple, and his technique somewhat unorthodox—he is after all, a self-taught carver, grown skillful through long periods of trial with the wooing of relief and shadow and with the spare particularity the stone is able to release. Working slowly, he feels the world shrink around him, small as a pudding basin. His attention becomes concentrated as he moves from scratch to groove, as he joins line and curve, elaborating an image that is no more at first than an atom flickering in his brain, bringing to it all its possibilities while guarding its pure modality, its essence—this, always, is the hardest part—and preparing himself for the moment when the worked stone is complete. (I wish somehow you might see these carved surfaces, how they send back to the eye a shiver of yielded revelation, so full of my father’s sad awkwardness and exertion, yet so cunning in their capture of precious light.)
Despite his gifts, the act of carving never ceases to be a labor for him—the whole of his body bends into the effort, and his face takes on that twisted monkey look of concentration you see on the faces of real artists or musicians. (Of course he never thinks of himself as an