Free The Stonemason by Cormac McCarthy

didn't know what it was you wanted.
    B EN I guess I don't. It's just that you're about the only person he knew that I didn't and I kept thinking that there must be somebody... there must be somebody ...
    M ARY I don't know why that poor man killed hisself.
    B EN No. I guess you don't.
    M ARY Do you?
    B EN ( Shaking his head ) No.
    They sit. She smokes.
    B EN I don't know anything about him. You live with someone all your life. All their life... My sister's boy. Fifteen years old. I thought he was just a troublesome kid. He was involved in things I hardly knew existed. The things I found out I couldn't believe. Yet they were so. They were so.
    M ARY Do you want to know what kind of man your father was? I knew him for ten years. Did you want to know that he was kind and sweet and generous? And a real man too. Because he was. Or did you come here to find out about yourself.
    He looks at her. He smiles. His eyes are wet.
    B EN I don't know. Maybe.
    M ARY What did he say about me. What did he say about me.
    B EN No.
    M ARY He never liked to talk about things once they was over and done with. I see you don't favor him in that respect leastways.
    She carefully stubs out the cigarette.
    M ARY It wasn't the money. Been the money he been dead years ago. He always had money troubles. Died owin me four hundred dollar.
    B EN I'll see that you get it.
    M ARY What for? You don't owe it. I don't want it noway.
    B EN He never talked about his family?
    M ARY Very seldom. Very seldom. Only thing I ever remember him to say that told me a little about his deeper thought was that he'd had two brothers and a sister and they was all dead. Him bein the baby of the family I think he felt alone in the world someway. He was not a happy man, Benny. Never was. If he had of been I wouldn't of had him.
    B EN Did his father dying have anything to do with it?
    M ARY I believe it did. But not the way you might think.
    Ben looks at her. She lights another cigarette.
    M ARY I think maybe when his daddy died that give him leave to go on and do what he done.
    B EN You don't think he could of done it with his father alive.
    She blows out smoke and shakes her head.
    M ARY No. No way.
    B EN But not his wife and children.
    M ARY Not his wife and children. Maybe it ought to be the same thing, but it ain't. You ought to know about that. That's why you here ain't it? Cause you cain't get around that daddy? Cain't get around that daddy.

SCENE III
    B EN Because I thought of my father in death more than I ever did in life. And think of him yet. The weight of the dead makes a great burden in this world. And I know all of him that I will ever know. Why could he not see the worth of that which he had put aside and the poverty of all he hungered for? Why could he not see that he too was blest? At times I think I came to the life of the laborer as the anchorite to his cell and pallet. The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be somehow justified thereby. That if enough of the world's weight only pass through his hands he must become inaugurated into the reality of that world in a way to withstand all scrutiny. A way not easily dissolved or set aside. Perhaps in his final avatar he might even come to sit holding his hat at a wooden folding table borrowed from a church basement watching the wind cross the world, already beyond wind or world or anything which they might propagate or anything at all.
    I lost my way. I'd thought by my labors to stand outside that true bend of gravity which is the world's pain. I lost my way and if I could tell you the hour of it or the day or how it came about I should not have lost it at all. Soldier did come back. He came back and we met secretly and I gave him money and sent him away again. Yet even before any of this I had a dream and this dream was a cautionary dream and a dream I did not heed.
    In my dream I had died or the world had ended and I stood waiting before the door of some ultimate justice