Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [33]
There is a good deal of shrieking and laughing on these excursions. Someone locates the mermaid stone. Someone else finds the carved cat, and the little stone down near the bottom which is inscribed with the single word "woe." The most knowledgeable person in the party will recount the history of the tower: a beautiful young wife dead of childbirth. A handsome young husband, stunned by grief—a man who can still be glimpsed occasionally, working away on the tower in the early morning hours, although he is no longer young, no longer handsome by the day’s standards, and no longer building with his original fervor; he is happy enough, in fact, to stop work and pass the time of day with visitors.
And the baby, what happened to the baby? No one seems to know.
It touches the heart. It does.
And now, just look at the time; the day-trippers must head back to the village and catch their train. The sun is dipping low. They walk more slowly; some of the couples hold hands or go arm in arm. One or two of them may turn, on an impulse, and look back at the tower. They are heard to comment aloud on the almost medieval look of the structure, and how strange it is to see a sight like this poking up in the middle of the prairie horizon. A remark will be made about the beauty of the limestone, how nearly it resembles Italian marble. One of the young men has pocketed a small carved nugget, which he fingers as he walks along. Someone else, one of the more bookish of the young women, murmurs something about the Taj Mahal in faraway India, how it too is a monument to lost love.
How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted.
How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. Ask Clarentine Flett.
We say a war is ended by a surrender, an armistice, a treaty. But, really, it just wears itself out, is no longer its own recompense, seems suddenly ignoble, part of the vast discourtesy of the world.
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe. Abe Skutari, after years and years of peddling door-to-door in rural Manitoba, is drummed out of business by Eaton’s Mail Order. Who would have expected such a thing? So what does he do but borrow money from the Royal Bank—the first such loan ever made to a son of Israel—and open his own retail establishment on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, specializing in men’s workclothes and footwear, garden supplies and bicycles. A door closes, a door opens; Mr. Skutari’s own words.
Professor Barker Flett in 1916 is at the end of his Winnipeg chapter. His mother is dead. His faith is exhausted. His thirty-three-year-old body frightens him with its perversities. The world frightens him, too, even as it beckons to him brightly, offering him whatever he desires, or almost. He must turn a page now, and move forward, eastward, Ottawa to be precise, the capital of the Dominion.
And my father, Cuyler Goodwill of Tyndall, Manitoba, has finished his tower. How does he know it is finished? The proportions tell him so, the wholly pleasing correspondence of height, width, circumference; one more course around the top and the thing would grow unbalanced; he looks at it and his thoughts become easy, almost lazy. And there have been so many visitors lately, and so many newspaper reporters. (He suspects that visitors are carrying