Free The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart

her hand. “You must make him wear it,” she said desperately, almost hysterically. “You must force him to put it on.”
    “And how am I to do that?”
    Dieter and Helga stood face to face: he breathing quickly, wanting to escape to his fields, she looking past his shoulder at the horizon that had so often enticed her son. Each hated the other and themselves for their part in Tilman’s confinement. “You’re bigger than he is,” Helga said finally.
    When Klara had been sent to bed in her room upstairs after a supper filled with a silence so profound she would recall it later as a fifth person at the table, Dieter coaxed his son into the woodshed. Golden light from the kitchen lamps entered through the connecting door, and silver light from the partial moon shone through one cloudy window.
    “You’re to sleep here now,” he said to the boy. Only the foot of the cot was visible in the block of light entering from the kitchen. “You’ll be our guard,” he explained, “for foxes in the hen house.”
    “Do I have to shoot them?” asked Tilman, who had begun to undress. He was fond of foxes.
    “No, no shooting,” Dieter placed his hand on his son’s shoulder, “but leave your clothes on. You may be required to be up in the night, just to yell at them.”
    The boy climbed between the flannel sheets. Dieter could see the harness. It was hanging from a hook on the opposite wall where a slice of moonlight appeared to have chopped the iron bars in half.
    Tilman was pleased by the proximity of the outdoors. “I’ll like to sleep here,” he said.
    His father did not answer but left the connecting door slightly ajar when he walked back into the kitchen.
    A dreaming child is like a weed underwater, each limb languid, heavy beneath a depth of sleep. Dieter was able to position and then close the harness around Tilman’s frail ribs and shoulders without disturbing his rest. Only once, with the sound of the lock clicking shut, did his eyes fly open, but he was not really awake and the lids lowered again one second later.
    The next morning, however, everyone in the house was hurled into consciousness by the terrible sound of Tilman’s howls as he flung himself to the end of his chain again and again. Around him his own dog ran in large, free circles, barking and snapping, as if the boy were already a stranger in the yard.
    Helga would never recover—not from his imprisonment and not from his escape.
    For the first few days on the chain the child would not eat at all, though his mother baked his favourite pies and stirred lumps of chocolate into mugs of warm milk. On the third day, he called repetitively for food and ate ravenously as if storing energy or building strength. Klara tried to talk to him in the yard, but he wouldn’t answer, and even while gobbling stew or eating porridge his eyes remained fixed on the horizon.
    Dieter, unable to bear the sight of the boy straining at the end of the chain, or the sound of his cries, left the house before dawn and returned to it in darkness when he hoped all were asleep. On the fourth night something growled at him when he crossed the yard, and he realized that Tilman had not gone indoors to sleep though the season was well enough advanced that there was a hard frost on the ground.
    Dieter sat down on the stoop beside the curled form that his son made in the dark. He tried to touch Tilman’s shoulder, but the boy twitched away from him.
    “Tilman,” he began, “your mother is half mad with worry about you, and me too, wondering what will become of you if you go off again. Would you give me your word that you’ll stay?”
    The boy began to whimper.
    His father continued, “How will you look after yourself? How will you learn to be a man?”
    There was nothing but silence now from Tilman, as if he might have decided to listen. His father put his head in his hands and, after a few moments, looked up at the stars. “Tomorrow we’ll fetch Father Gallagher, and if he