Free The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart Page B

smaller in the distance, heading west with the newly risen sun on his back. She placed her inner arm on the window frame, pressed her forehead against her wrist, and counted to one hundred in order to let him get away. When she lifted her head she could still see him, his shadow twice the height of a full-grown man stretching out in front of him, his chain trailing behind him like print on the page of the road, like the end, or the beginning, of a story.

 
    M ay of 1914 turned to June of 1914 and still Eamon stayed away from the Becker farm. Klara’s father made only one remark about the young man’s continuing absence, a remark that Klara suspected was delivered in order to save her pride.
    “I expect the men at O’Sullivan’s farm are just about as busy as we are here these days.”
    Klara said nothing. She hated his attempts at cheerful excuses. This desire to make ordinary all that was dark and unfathomable was a weakness in her father, a habit that had in the past stood in sharp contrast to her mother’s anguish, her mother’s fury. But he was also a man who, after his son’s disappearance, would do anything rather than risk one more drop of rain falling into the ocean of his own concealed despair. He had in constant effect an unshakable policy of neutral appeasement.
    “Almost haying time,” he added, while his daughter pretended not to be listening.
    They parted then, he leaving for the crops, she climbing the stairs to sew. She had been working every evening as long as the light lasted in order to finish a groom’s waistcoat for Albert Stechley, and a satin gown and a veil for her neighbour, Katrin Erb, his bride-to-be. Klara’s agreeing to work on the latter garment came dangerously close to dressmaking and would have shocked her mother, particularly because the fashions of the day inclined toward frills and laces and away from the strictly tailored.
    “A good suit is all a woman needs for a wedding,” her mother had always declared. “Anything else is mere frivolity.”
    The bride’s dress was to have a line of buttons descending in a perfectly straight row down the centre of the bodice to the waist, but because the gown hooked at the back, these were to be for decorative purposes only. The bride herself would have been contented with buttons covered by the same satin fabric as made up the rest of the dress, but Klara had determined that a little picture, or symbol, by which the day might be commemorated should decorate the buttons. A flower perhaps, or the sliver of a new moon, or an open fan. For all her hidden passion for such details Klara was nevertheless a great believer in uniformity; there would only be one symbol or picture repeated. The choice would be difficult.
    On this summer evening then, Klara sat cross-legged on the smooth surface of the large table in the sunroom surrounded by a semicircle of mother-of-pearl buttons, her back curved, her chin on one fist, her free hand picking up and then returning to its place one small object after another. Every now and then she lifted her head and squinted across the room in the direction of the tailor’s dummy and the unfinished gown that adorned it, then resumed her study of the buttons. Years later she would still remember the images before her that night: the profile of a woman, a rampant lion with a marcasite eye, the moon, a star, several flowers, a spider, an apple, a cross, clasped hands, a fleur-de-lys, a maple leaf, a book, a coat of arms, a crown, a ruined tower, a bird, a pair of birds, an urn, a broken column, and a sampling of geometric shapes.
    The top of the table that Klara sat upon, though over two feet wide, was made from a single board taken from one of the trees of the virgin forest that had filled the parish during Father Archangel Gstir’s time. This irreplaceable woodland had been felled with alarming swiftness, had been floated down rivers to sawmills, loaded on lake boats, then shipped down the St. Lawrence River to