The Stone Carvers

This was the way it was going to be then, this road she was going to have to walk. She would always be thinking of him so that he would be beside her even when he wasn't there, making her joyous or miserable, but always, always controlling the colour of her days.

She knew she was a purveyor of costume, of disguise, a fabricator of persona, one who touched only the protective surface, never the skin, the heart. She was beginning, as a consequence, to envy almost everyone she met, to envy their small preoccupations, their carefully kept account books, the way they stood on streetcorners talking about farm machinery, the weather, the price of a bag of oats, fully connected for the moment to these ordinary things. Her connection continually slipped downstream, against the current, toward the swiftly disappearing past. What beyond the most cursory, practical knowledge of fashion, had the present to do with her?

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

What do you do with everything that is cut away?" she asked Tilman, thinking now about the negative space of stone sculpture, the stone that is discarded, thinking too about how she had thrown away huge pieces of her own early life...

I don't know what I mean, but I know I believe it.

She lay on her back and looked up through soft green, or she stood waist-deep in the water and floated her open hands on a dark surface covered with echoes of light. The shadows of leaves were like bruises on her skin.

What she wanted was never again to be torn from sleep by love, never again to be awakened by grief.

And all around them, stretching as far as the market town of Arras, the dank tunnels, like graves, out of which thousands of young men had rushed into the brimstone air.

she remembered the pure joy of making art, how the self connected with the emerging form.

Lines, circles and curves corresponding to a cherished, remembered sound called over fields at summer dusk from a back porch door, shouted perhaps in anger or whispered in passion, or in prayer, in the winter dark. All that remained of torn faces, crushed bone, scattere bones.

The stern marble faces of these men can still be seen in the graveyards of Hamilton, though they have become soiled over the years from the soot produced by the factories that made them rich enough to afford tombs of this nature.

Someday," Joseph said to his granddaughter, "someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.

The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun.